VERDICT: An innocuous question intended to be sexy and intimate probes at relationship boundaries in this short about what it means to be truly honest and truly accepted
In Claire Barnett’s short film, Freak, a young couple find themselves unexpectedly at odds after an apparently harmless question seems to drive a sudden wedge between them.
Lainey (Nancy McArthur) and her partner (Oliver Demers) are having an intimate night together on the eve of her 26th birthday asking each other personal questions while pointing a camcorder at one another. When Lainey is prompted to divulge her deepest, darkest, most embarrassing sexual fantasy, her answer provokes a surprising response. Through this scenario, Freak deftly explores our capacity for understanding and empathy, while needling how our insecurities come so immediately to bear in moments of stress and argument.
When her partner finds the adolescent kink that she reveals to them to be ‘a little weird’ their conversation immediately spirals into recriminations about how accepting and supportive they both genuinely are of each other’s histories and identities. Slights may not be imagined, but they are exploded by both parties’ self-doubt into parts of more labyrinthine behavioural patterns that bely their outward approval. In Lainey’s case, these concerns surround her strongly religious upbringing and its position as both quaint detail and embarrassing secret. In the other direction are worries about Lainey’s understanding of her partner’s queerness, their appearance masculine enough to pass as long as her family aren’t subjected to telltale lip gloss.
All of this is presented like an overheard conversation, the viewer put in the position of the camcorder lens, watching through grungy video aesthetics until the camera is dropped onto the bed when their disagreement begins. We are not seeing what is happening, but we listen in, eavesdropping and drawing our own judgmental conclusion about their tit-for-tat exchange. In just 13 minutes, Barnett manages to explore this situation in a nuanced way, encapsulating the precarity of our acceptance by others, or at least the way we internalise a precarity based on our own self-image. That she also ends Freak with a moment of pitch-perfect catharsis and hope is the icing on the cake.
Director, editing: Claire Barnett
Cast: Nancy McArthur, Oliver Demers
Producer: Claire Barnett, Natalie Remplakowski
Cinematography: Claire Barnett, Nancy McArthur, Oliver Demers
Sound design: Giorgi Koridze, Nino Benashvili
Production: Claire Barnett (USA)
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Pardi di Domani – Concorso Internatzionale)
In English
13 minutes
