Crew
Director – Freddy MacDonald, Screenplay – Fred MacDonald & Freddy MacDonald, Producers – Sebastian Klinger, Fred MacDonald, Barry Navidi, Diamantis Zavitsanos & Socratis Zavitsanos, Photography/Visual Effects – Sebastian Klinger, Music – Jacon Tardien, Special Effects Supervisor – Oliver Keller, Prosthetic Designer – Miria Germano, Production Design – Viviane Rapp. Production Company – MacDonald Entertainment Partners/Orisono/Barry Navidi Productions.
Cast
Eve Connolly (Barbara Duggen), Calum Worthy (Joshua Armitage), John Lynch (Hudson Armitage), K. Callan (Ms Engel), Caroline Goodall (Grave Vessler), Thomas Douglas (Beck), Ron Cook (Oskar), Werner Beirmeier (Melvin)
Plot
Barbara Duggen lives in a tiny Swiss town where she works as a mobile seamstress, a failing business she has inherited from her late mother. On a call out to fix a wedding dress, she returns to the shop for a spare button only to come across a crash on the road. It becomes apparent that two motorcyclists shot each other over a drug deal and a suitcase of money. She takes the suitcase and uses her thread to contrive a way to let the two men shoot one another as she drives off. She returns to pick up the man who wasn’t killed and drags him back to the shop. However, this creates a chain of events that leaves Barbara strangled to death by a gangster come to collect the suitcase. In re-running the events, Barbara is able to make different choices in what she does, leading to radically diverging outcomes of events.
Sew Torn was the feature-length directorial debut of 24-year-old Swiss-American Freddy McDonald. McDonald had been making short films since the age of fourteen and found acclaim and won several awards with the six-minute long short Sew Torn (2019). From this he was given international backing to expand his short as a feature film, while bringing on board a number of name actors.
Sew Torn is essentially a one gimmick film. It consists of a series of set-pieces where seamstress Eve Connolly uses her needle and threads to create a series of Rube Goldberg devices. After coming on the accident scene, she attaches threads to the two guns lying on the road and then drives away in her car, dragging the guns along so that the two men can grab them and shoot one another. There is an elaborate set up where she uses a sewing machine and swathe of thread to drag a bound Thomas Douglas up the stairs. Threads are used everywhere to create traps for gunmen as they enter the door or to hook keys from a desk as they are cuffed up in the jail. There is quite an ingenuity and amusement that goes into watching each of these set-pieces unfold.
Freddy McDonald has expanded on his original short in interesting ways – now Sew Torn becomes akin to a Run Lola Run (1998) in that it offers up three different accounts of events all based on branching timelines. There were a bunch of similar Alternate Timelines films around the same time as Run Lola Run with Sliding Doors (1998), Twice Upon a Yesterday (1998), Me Myself I (1999), The Family Man (2000) and The Butterfly Effect (2004).
Here we get three different versions of events depending on what Eve Connolly does where her interactions with the various characters come to wildly different outcomes, including ones with her dead. It is interesting and amusing to watch, even if you feel that the whole multiple choice storylines film has been done before. Nevertheless, it adds quite a quirky likeability to Sew Torn.
Trailer here