Multiple alternate realities, none of them remotely familiar with our own, coexist in “Sew Torn,” a high-concept crime farce that pits guns against haberdashery, innocence against guilt and genre-warring against madcap fantasy. Even though the film blatantly steals its structural conceit from Tom Tykwer’s ’90s trendsetter “Run Lola Run” — a movie made before 24-year-old writer-director-editor Freddy Macdonald was born — this is a debut feature strange and unique enough to win its own devoted following, with its mix of folksy small-town antics, nasty neo-noir suspense and literally sophisticated comedy centered around a heroine reminiscent of MacGyver with a pocket sewing kit. Some will love the silliness of the film, others will think it’s an over-the-top joke, but many will remember Macdonald’s name.
Sew Torn is a real looker, if not exactly meaty. It’s clearly an extension of Macdonald’s 2019 short of the same name: an already promising calling card that was acquired by Searchlight Pictures, landed the filmmaker a deal with UTA, and made him the youngest director ever accepted to the AFI Conservatory. The feature-length version still feels schoolmasterly in some ways—Macdonald’s script, which he co-wrote with his father, Fred, has a clumsy tendency to speak and repeat its central thematic points—but stands out for its technical agility and poppy narrative verve. Already well-received at SXSW in the spring, this Swiss-American co-production just had its international premiere in the populist program at Locarno’s Piazza Grande: genre-focused indie distributors will surely be checking it out.
“Choices, decisions, decisions,” intones protagonist Barbara (Eve Connolly) in a voiceover early in the film—a mantra we’ll hear several more times as the narrative keeps coming back on itself and branching out. She asks the viewer to evaluate their own choices in the story that follows, wondering, “Would you feel sorry for me or recognize my lack of morals?” Most viewers will probably do neither, at least not without asking themselves several more pressing questions. First off: Why are we in a green Swiss Alpine valley where no one is Swiss and everyone speaks English? (Macdonald moved to Switzerland with his family as a child, which at least provides some external context for the setting.) What year, exactly, is it? What’s the deal with the sewing? Is this movie real?
Yes and no, it turns out—though Barbara, with her serious, proper demeanor, takes the matter very seriously. An orphan and alone in the world, she’s been trying to keep her late mother’s mobile tailoring business afloat, as was her mother’s dying wish, but she’s about to admit defeat and close the shop. (It turns out that in rural, fictional Swiss-America, there’s not much demand for the company’s specialty service: cross-stitched “talking portraits” with built-in sound. What a world.) A lone remaining customer, haughty, middle-aged bride-to-be Grace (Caroline Goodall), hires her to adjust her wedding dress, but when a crucial button flies off—and Barbara throws it away in a fit of chagrin—the seamstress must drive back across the valley to get a replacement.
The plot falls apart when Barbara’s unplanned drive around a quiet bend leads her to an unreported accident and crime scene: two badly injured motorcyclists in the middle of the road, a ripped open cocaine shipment smeared on the asphalt, and a briefcase full of cash lying just out of reach of the two motorcyclists. As Barbara assesses the damage, she concludes that she can do one of three things: steal the loot, call the police, or just keep driving. “Sew Torn” goes on to methodically list the consequences of each option: the outcomes vary, but each brings her into contact with psychotic gangster Hudson (John Lynch) and outspoken elderly sheriff Ms. Engel (K Callan), putting her in a kind of bind from which only her skillful handiwork can extricate her.
It is these insanely constructed scenes that are both the greatest absurdity of the film and its right to exist, While Barbara turns spools of thread into elaborate pulleys, shackles and thread traps, she darts through a labyrinth of cotton in a dizzyingly choreographed fight dance to Betty Hutton’s classic musical number “The Sewing Machine.”
The thriller elements of “Sew Torn” are just a pretext for this heightened dream whimsy: The characters are so abstract that the life-and-death stakes of the plot become almost beside the point, though Connolly is a sufficiently lovable presence to keep us enthralled by Barbara’s erratic movements, if not their far-fetched moral consequences. Aided by Sebastian Klinger’s rich, primary-color cinematography and Viviane Rapp’s leisurely, era-blurring production design, “Sew Torn” conjures a kind of adult toy town where time and mortality can be altered, casually torn apart and sewn back together. If Macdonald can apply this cavalier remaking of reality to bigger ideas and bolder story silhouettes, he could well be the next big star.
