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.
Much of the film’s visual (and indeed narrative) stylings come together via Barbara’s various spools of thread, which Sew Torn creatively repurposes as something akin to tools of a vigilante or superhero’s trade. Even before she’s come across the two men and their briefcase full of cash on a deserted road, the film visually keys us in to her incredible seamstress abilities. Her home is decorated in spider-like webs of thread extending across the walls and ceilings, suspending various photos of her deceased mother, the original mobile seamstress whose untimely death left the faltering shop to young Barbara. Pull a cord in any portrait, and a sound byte plays–they’re a style of “talking portrait” that her mother devised, and her only remaining connection to the woman who raised her. The whole house takes on the look of a serial killer’s “conspiracy board/crazy wall” trope, which all serves to illustrate a simple point: Barbara can do a lot of nutty things with a few spools of thread and her seamstress tools.
This is a great gimmick, but one that the film attempts to exploit with mixed results. As Barbara attempts to use her thread–and a strong grasp on elementary physics–to do tasks such as move a struggling man’s body, or escape from handcuffs, the visual language of Sew Torn can unfortunately become a bit jumbled and not always entirely coherent. This can lead the audience to lose track of exactly what they’re seeing or how exactly the thread is being physically employed, which breaks the delightful sense of immersion in the Rube Goldberg-esque hijinks that Macdonald is attempting to deliver. It’s one of those instances where you can imagine how much better these sequences could still be with top-notch production: If this was an Edgar Wright movie, the editing of these thread scenes would be not only propulsive and stylish, but easier for the audience to follow. As an editor, the young Macdonald just isn’t quite on that level, not yet. And that’s only to be expected, as Sew Torn is his first feature. This film is just evocative of a talented visual storyteller who is still coming into his own.
The same can be said for the film’s performances, anchored by the calm and collected Eve Connolly as Barbara, looking for all intents and purposes like a young Hilary Swank or Claire Danes. Her terse interactions with other characters feel subtly grating and artificial, a feeling that is amplified in the film’s second half, which goes from laconic to talky, revolving around Tarantinoesque conversations with the two criminals involved in the botched drug deal. Suffice to say, these sequences don’t quite hold the tension that they should, which comes down largely to performances by the ensemble that can be difficult to parse–is the elderly police officer woman (K. Callan) acting aloof and oblivious as a ruse, or is she merely unintelligent? Why does she make no preparations when told that a man is coming to the station to kill everyone inside it? We’re left without a baseline of understanding for why characters are acting with no sense of urgency, even in situations that are life and death. The film sacrifices coherence as it attempts to measure up to some of its Coen-esque crime caper inspirations.
There’s still a lot of intriguing material in Sew Torn, which begins with a central premise that is too intriguingly fun to entirely pass by. Macdonald’s film gets plenty creative in its threadwork, but feels like it could still use a few more passes in order to hold together in the long run.
Director: Freddy Macdonald Writer: Freddy Macdonald Stars: Eve Connolly, Calum Worthy, John Lynch, K. Callan, Ron Cook, Thomas Douglas, Caroline Goodall Release date: May 9, 2025
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.
