Several alternate realities, none of them remotely acquainted with ours, exist side-by-side in “Sew Torn,” a high-concept crime farce that pits guns against haberdashery, innocence against culpability, and genre grit against fruit-loop fantasy. Even as it nakedly steals its structural conceit from Tom Tykwer’s Nineties trendsetter “Run Lola Run” — a film made before 24-year-old writer-director-editor Freddy Macdonald was born — this is a debut feature strange and singular enough to attract its own keen following, with its blend of folksy small-town hijinks, nasty neo-noir tension and literally crafty comedy, centered around a heroine who calls to mind MacGyver with a pocket sewing kit. Some will thrill to the film’s silliness, others may find it a joke stretched beyond elasticity, but it’ll have many putting a pin in Macdonald’s name.
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Eye-catching if hardly substantial, “Sew Torn” is quite obviously expanded from Macdonald’s 2019 short of the same title: an already auspicious calling card that was acquired by Searchlight Pictures, got the filmmaker signed with UTA, and made him the youngest director ever accepted to the AFI Conservatory. The feature-length version still feels studenty in some respects — Macdonald’s script, written with his father Fred, has a blunt tendency to speak and repeat its core thematic points — but stands out for its technical agility and poppy storytelling verve. Already well-received at SXSW in the spring, this Swiss-U.S. co-production just had its international premiere in Locarno’s populist Piazza Grande program: Genre-inclined indie distributors will surely investigate.
“Choices, choices, choices,” intones protagonist Barbara (Eve Connolly) in voiceover at the film’s outset — a mantra that we’ll hear several more times as the narrative keeps doubling back on itself and branching out anew. Inviting the viewer to judge her own choices in the story to follow, she wonders: “Would you pity me or see my lack of morality?” Most viewers are likely to do neither, at least not before asking several more pressing questions. For starters, why are we in a verdant Swiss Alpine valley where nobody is Swiss, and everyone speaks English? (Macdonald moved to Switzerland with his family as a child, which at least provides some outside context for the setting.) What year is it, exactly? What’s the deal with the sewing? Is this movie for real?
Yes and no, it turns out — though Barbara, with her solemn, wholesome demeanor, certainly takes matters very seriously. Orphaned and alone in the world, she has tried to keep her late mother’s mobile seamstress business afloat, in accordance with mom’s dying wish, but is finally on the brink of admitting defeat and closing up shop. (Turns out in rural imaginary Switzamerica, there isn’t much call for the business’s signature service: cross-stitch “talking portraits” with inbuilt audio. What a world.) A lone remaining client, haughty middle-aged bride-to-be Grace (Caroline Goodall), hires her to adjust her wedding dress, but when a crucial button goes flying — and Barbara, in a fit of pique, throws it away — the seamstress must drive back across the valley to retrieve a replacement.
Cue a splintering of the narrative, as the unplanned drive sees Barbara stumble upon an as-yet-unreported accident and crime scene on a quiet bend: two motorcyclists critically injured in the middle of the road, a torn-open bounty of cocaine streaking the asphalt, and a briefcase full of cash lying beyond either biker’s grasp. Surveying the damage, Barbara concludes she can do one of three things: steal the loot, call the cops, or simply drive on by. “Sew Torn” proceeds to methodically relate the fallout of each option: Outcomes vary, though each brings her into contact with psychotic gangster Hudson (John Lynch) and plain-speaking elderly sheriff Ms. Engel (K Callan), and places her in some manner of jam from which only her expert needlework can free her.
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It’s these deliriously contrived setpieces that prove both the film’s greatest absurdity and its raison d’être, as Barbara works spools of thread into elaborate pulleys, restraints and cat’s-cradle traps — at one point darting through a tangled maze of cotton in a dizzily choreographed combat dance, set to the vintage Betty Hutton musical number “The Sewing Machine.”
“Sew Torn’s” thriller trappings are a mere pretext for this heightened dream-whimsy: The characters are so abstract as to render the life-and-death stakes of the plotting close to incidental, though Connolly is a sufficiently endearing presence to keep us compelled by Barbara’s erratic movements, if not their far-fetched moral consequences. With an assist from Sebastian Klinger’s saturated, primary-colored cinematography and Viviane Rapp’s cozy, era-blurring production design, “Sew Torn” conjures a kind of adult toytown in which time and mortality can be altered, casually ripped apart and stitched back together. If Macdonald can apply this blithe redesign of reality to bigger ideas and bolder story silhouettes, he may well be the next big thing.
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