PrimeWire

I’m surprised I’d never heard of this little gem before. Actually, I shouldn’t diminish this film by calling it “little”, as it is in fact quite large and vast in its breadth of emotion.
This is actually a trilogy of three short films, “Cutting Moments” “Home” and “Prologue”. The first is a very stark, tense, and quite honestly brutally sad scenario. We see a normal-looking but completely emotionally dysfunctional young family. A pretty wife with a detached, cold and callous husband who mistreats their son, out of his own lack of empathy or any apparent feeling. His wife deals with this in several ways, one more conventional, the other… much more abstract, and much, much harder to watch. The contrast between an unfortunately all-too-familiar scene—- the commonality of a broken marriage, a heart-bruising sadness many to which many can relate—- and the drastic physical actions she inflicts on herself bring this episode to a painful close. There’s an unbearable tension as we see a spiral of repressed feelings burst into warped physical expressions.

Then we have “Home”, which echoes a similar setup. A man raised in an abusive family has grown up grasping desperately for any kind of normalcy, seeking to forget his past. As with the previous short, there’s excellent, very natural acting, in a setting that could be just about anywhere. He narrates several painful episodes of his childhood that seem to have pre-emptively cursed his future, for they are all too similar to the current problems he’s facing. He’s disconnected from his birth family, as he is from his marital family. This one is a bit more existential than personal, less gorey than the first, but still quite a lot to think about. He we explore the desire for connection versus the desire for control, for retribution, resolution, or even destruction. When things just seem to never go as planned. It touches on not only detachment from others but the self and even god and nature, a certain emptiness that only some are unfortunate enough to really truly know.

“Prologue” is where the tone shifts a bit. A young woman is a year recovered from a traumatic event in which she lost her hands, now using a wheelchair. She is moving back in with her parents, although they aren’t quite as she remembered them. Their relationship has changed, but it has changed between the parents themselves as well. This one explores the subtleties of how an individual chooses to process their trauma, alone and with family, and how trauma is perceived by others. In particular the naturalistic acting style really shines in this one, it almost feels voyeuristic as if you just happen to have a bird’s eye view into the most intimate part of various people’s lives, right down to details that would usually go unseen. The stark coldness from the beginning of the trilogy has thawed a bit here, where the tone is reminiscent of a welcome and painful healing, like a bone knitting back together. It’s also the only story that has a sense of resolution, which is welcome after how gut-punching the first two vignettes are.

This is not a happy nor pleasant film, however, it isn’t so depressing as to be unwatchable. Instead, it’s a careful, rather tasteful exploration of true darkness that can easily weave into even the most seemingly ordinary lives, weaseling in like a parasite. While there are several quite graphic and shocking scenes (particularly in “Cutting moments”), nothing is portrayed as a cheap shock or random twist. No, this is a very deliberate, thoughtful venture into events and feelings rarely talked about, but probably more relatable than most would ever tell. Definitely interested in seeing more work from Douglas Buck.