Imaginative Crime Thriller Sew Torn Still Has Too Many Loose Threads

Looking at an effective, six-minute short film and saying “This should be a feature,” will most always invite the likelihood of overstepping the natural creative boundaries of a concept. It’s the nature of the beast; what works well in a vacuum may seem more insubstantial when you have to surround it with the superstructure of a narrative feature film. What is clever for a few minutes may become tired or irritating over the course of 100 minutes. Or in the case of director Freddy Macdonald’s Sew Torn, currently in limited theatrical release, a fun central premise and promising sense of artistic verve may simply not be enough to prop up a patchwork quilt of a whole, one constantly in danger of unraveling entirely.
Sew Torn was indeed originally a six-minute, wordless short film, produced by Macdonald as a film school application project in 2019. It depicts a lone woman who stumbles upon a most unexpected opportunity, who is forced to make an ethical choice: Driving down a rural road, this “mobile seamstress” (in a car outfitted with a big spool of thread on the back) happens upon a botched drug deal, with two nearly disabled men and a briefcase full of cash. Does she report the incident? Or keep the money, while employing her preternatural abilities with thread in order to silence the two men for good? You can probably guess which is the more likely outcome, from an entertainment standpoint.
The feature film version of Sew Torn, meanwhile, replicates this exact same scenario (practically shot for shot), but expands into a feature that frames itself as an exploration of choice. These, it boils down to “perfect crime,” (keep the money, kill the wounded men), “call the police” (while trying to keep the money), or “drive away” (but then inexplicably return). We see the butterfly effect-like outcomes of each choice play out before returning to the point of the choice, ‘ala Run Lola Run. It’s meant to be illustrative of the vagaries of chance and fate, the way small decisions snowball to various outcomes, but those choices hardly feel legitimate or organic when they all thrust our protagonist Barbara (Eve Connolly) back into the crime story by her own decision. The idea of the “call the police” and “drive away” options are seemingly meant to illustrate how trouble will still find you even if you try to do “the right thing” or remain uninvolved, but in both of those options Barbara never truly attempts to remove herself from the developing situation–she either still behaves with greed and attempts to keep the money, or she simply returns to the scene of the crime and gets swept back up into the action as if she’d never left. The idea that our fate will still find a way to track us down would have been better illustrated through scenarios where she actively tried to avoid it, rather than running right back to said fate with open arms. It undercuts the entire choice-based theme.
This is an illustration of how the feature film version of Sew Torn ends up feeling clumsily plotted, and that unfortunately clashes with a film that is typically attractively assembled and lensed in other respects. Macdonald evolves the more dour visual palette of the short film to embrace a more colorful and saturated style, while setting the film in rural Switzerland, counterpointing the dark thematic content with bright, beautiful vistas. This helps to lend a certain visual levity, and the expectation of quirkiness, although the Coen-esque sense of macabre humor doesn’t seem to be fully hatched. Sew Torn feels haltingly funny when it wants to be serious; dire and grounded when it wants to be kooky. Its instincts are frequently at odds with each other, though it does look attractive throughout.