Sean O. McGuiness’ She Listens Alone opens by introducing us to the life of its protagonist Sabrina Nolan (Alivia Levie). It is a life which comprises other people’s lives, seen and heard remotely on screen – and a life which is not turning out as expected, planned or desired, and which leaves her feeling unfulfilled and empty.
When studying to be a therapist, Sabrina envisaged being able to help her clients “face to face”, but now her consultations are exclusively online and at a distance through website service Better Well. Her boyfriend of two years Mike (Forest Quaglia) is “not ready to settle down”, and has a roaming eye for his co-worker Jessica (Chelsea Vale). Sabrina’s parents have retired to Mexico, leaving her to live alone in their beautiful modernist home, both sealed from and exposed to the outside world by its many large glass windows. She has suffered some kind of recent trauma whose details are never revealed and which may – although again this is never spelt out – be part of the reason that she has become so housebound, prickly and cautious around other people. She feels isolated and alienated, and amid a blurred parade of on-screen patients who all seem to be caught up in their own never-ending narrative circles (“same stories, different faces,” Sabrina observes), she has lost all sense of achievement, direction or indeed self. In her dreams she sees herself without a face – and she has even appropriated into her own oneiric life a dream that her client Anna (Sadeeah Bunch) has described to her about being murdered by a slasher-like intruder. Any therapist could tell you that Sabrina is clearly confused about who she is.
Things change when Sabrina takes on a new client, 20-year-old Andrew Domeski (Wyatt Tithof). He is, despite his obvious intelligence, a college dropout, “intense” by his own admission, unable to relate to anyone his own age and having a tendency to “push people away.” Andrew too, like Sabrina, is lonely and longs for connection. With Sabrina, Andrew feels for the first time that someone is really listening to him, even if it is only her job – and with Andrew, Sabrina feels for once that her work is having an impact and actually helping someone who appreciates her for what she does. So their client/therapist relationship is good for both of them – until Andrew becomes overattached, starts crossing a line, and is soon obsessively stalking Sabrina. Now Sabrina’s – or at least Anna’s – nightmare appears to be coming true.
McGuiness’ directorial debut, scripted by Joseph Verrastro, is very much in the mould of an erotic thriller or a ‘bunny boiler’ movie (there is even, amid the patient vox pops that open the film, a sly reference to a vindictive partner who “took the dog”) – but it is also, as Sabrina’s job as a therapist implies, a psychodrama, revealing its protagonist’s struggles to work throught her inner problems. As such, reality here is always a step behind projection, transference and countertransference.
Andrew’s parents accuse Sabrina of stalking their son rather than the other way around, and call on their policeman friend Carl O’Brien (McGuiness in cameo) to arrest her – and the truth is, Sabrina does act both inappropriately and unprofessionally, giving Andrew her private phone number, meeting him out of session in a bar, and looking up his home address in the system. It seems entirely possible to read this as a story of an adult woman taking manipulative advantage of a young, vulnerable man, told from her own deluded point of view. Meanwhile much as Sabrina identifies qualities in Andrew that he has not himself recognised, he does the same for her – and also directs his aggression at precisely those who have angered her. Such is the mirroring between these two characters that at times you may even wonder if Andrew is really hounding Sabrina at all, or if she is merely imagining his presence and predatory drives as a convenient foil for her own dark instincts and impulses.
Perhaps, much as Sabrina is repeatedly shown playing solitaire at home, so too parts of this escapade are her solipsistic fantasy (the third word of the film’s title also hints at this), allowing her to get, at least in her mind, the narcissistic validation that she otherwise lacks, even if it comes in the form of unwelcome attention and intrusive adoration. Perhaps Sabrina, having listened alone to her different clients’ accounts (shown in montage at the beginning) of their troubles and anxieties, is comositing them into a story all her own. Her patient Anna says of her dream – the one that Sabrina subsequently also adopts and experiences – “I still replay it, like my brain is searching for something in it… Maybe proof… that is wasn’t just a dream.” The challenge for the viewer in She Listens Alone is sorting what is actual and factual from what is merely imagined and ideated – what happens in the real world, and what merely refects Sabrina’s conflicted dreams and desires. For this is a film that positions us as therapist, and gets us to determine what is missing from the life of its subject Sabrina, on the other side of the screen, and what she really wants. Just make sure you listen closely.
strap: In Sean O. McGuiness’ slippery psychodrama, a therapist is stalked by a young client – or by her own desires and fantasies
© Anton Bitel
