2022, directed by Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes
You know that thing where a character just keeps on making bad decision after bad decision as everything goes to shit around them? I can’t stand that thing. Snowballing consequences can be done really well when all of a character’s choices make sense in the moment, otherwise I end up torturing myself for days afterwards thinking about all the things they could have done to prevent everything that came afterwards. I can’t entirely say that Sissy (rather, Cecelia – much of the film is spent with her trying not to be seen as Sissy) could have prevented everything, since Alex was the one to initiate the first major confrontation, but she could definitely have chosen not to go to the entire weekend in a rural area that she wouldn’t be able to escape from to spend time with someone she had an incredibly fraught history with and who had no idea she’d been invited.
But then, while we’re clearly set up to sympathise with Cecelia to begin with, there are signs right from the start that things might not be quite how they appear. Even in the home video when Sissy declares that she and Emma are best friends because they have so much in common we aren’t actually given any examples before Emma launches into the story of how they’ve known each other since birth. There’s a clear delineation in Sissy’s apartment between her filming space and her cluttered, messy kitchen, and then when she runs into Emma in the pharmacy the camera work exquisitely creates a sense of frenetic, manic smothering through close ups on their faces as they over-act their (whether sincere or not) excitement at seeing each other again.
This social claustrophobia carries through until the weekend and it’s easy to feel Cecelia’s stress and anxiety rising as she attempts to re-connect with Emma. It’s when the bodies start inevitably piling up that it becomes clear that it’s not so much about Emma, or even about Alex, as it is about Cecelia and her futile attempt to fill a hole inside herself. (You do have to wonder about the racial dynamics when they choose to cast a Black woman in this inherently damaged role, though at the very least she’s not the only Black character.)
I do think this is a well-made movie, but I found it extremely hard to watch and deeply uncomfortable to the point of struggling to finish it due to the… I suppose it would come under second-hand embarrassment, though it didn’t feel entirely like embarrassment the way you typically get from watching media in which someone deeply uncool tries to come off as suave, or someone tries to salvage a relationship with a person who’s no longer interested in them. Sissy instead evokes something like desperation, almost revulsion, of a kind I don’t like to subject myself to. Maybe that just means it was successful.