Crime cocaine crochet and schnitzels, in that order
dir: Freddy Macdonald
2025
It’s not often that a film’s title becomes part of the international (in English, at least) vernacular. I don’t just mean when a film’s title becomes almost universally recognisable or known because it’s watched by all (something which rarely happens these days anyway).
I mean when a title like Sliding Doors takes on a life of its own as a phrase people use to describe a particular thing, like the so-called ”Sliding Doors moment” that people might experience in life that has nothing to do with the film.
Whether you remember that flick fondly or with fury, or with complete indifference, or have never heard of it, chances still are that you’ve heard someone use the phrase “it was a real sliding doors moment”, describing something small or seemingly random that made a profound difference to someone’s life either immediately or down the track, in ways no one could have anticipated. You missed a particular meeting or flight, and you didn’t die in the September 11 attacks. You stubbed your toe and that meant you just escaped from being run over by a semi-trailer.
You stayed at the pub one night one drink longer than you should have, and so that’s why you’re in jail / married / head of the Nationals / One Nation party now
In movies it’s not always easy to pull off, because unless there’s some kind of conceit / construct, audiences can sometimes be like “what the fuck am I watching and why should I care?” And even when there is one, it can still be hard to swallow.
Run Lola Run never explained why its protagonist got multiple chances to replay the same scenario until it hopefully resulted in an outcome where neither Lola nor her dumb boyfriend died, but, if you enjoyed the flick back in the day, hopefully you were happy and relieved at the film’s end, but let’s admit it was mostly down to the soundtrack.
There’s no mechanism, no glitch in the Matrix or in the space-time continuum that explains why Gwyneth Paltrow catching a train or not catching a train results in one path in life (that leads to premature death) and an alternative one as well, but we accept it as such, because we want things to be enjoyable more than we want them to make sense. And plus the film has John Hannah at his most charming and delightful as the love interest, so what’s not to like?
Well, Gwyneth, for one. But I digress. If that film had a point, it was a very simplistic and mawkish one, being the idea that it was inevitable that the two lovers would meet and fall in love, no matter which storyline and who dies when, and regardless of whether she caught the train or not.
I mention this because this film here, Sew Torn obviously uses a version of this kind of storytelling, alternative what ifs? that it factors not solely based on random outcomes arising from unexpected moments, but there’s the repetitive chant of “choices… choices… choices” that’s meant to resonate with us. People, or in this case “person”, in the form of Barbara (Eve Connelly), gets multiple opportunities to make choices that may or may not result in many people’s deaths and a bag full of cash.
Right, wrong, who’s to judge? Well, us, for one.
I keep mentioning Sliding Doors, and that is not a coincidence. If you remember the flick well, a certain portion of the flick, either storyline, had to do with Gwyneth’s boyfriend cheating on her, and by boyfriend I don’t mean the delightful John Hannah, who was the love interest, I mean her shitty, gaslighting, mooch of a boyfriend. I have no idea what the character’s name was and I choose not to know. But I remember the actor who played him, being John Lynch.
He’s pretty distinctive looking, with massive eyebrows and such. Looks very Irish. I may have seen him in a tonne of other stuff, but he’s always, to me, the shitty boyfriend from Sliding Doors. If my partner and I bumped into him in the street we’d be like “isn’t that the shitty boyfriend from Sliding Doors?” and he’d probably say “I have a name, you know.”
Again why do I keep mentioning all this: John Lynch has a substantial role in this film, and that could not be a coincidence, given everything I’ve just written. Even though that was over twenty years ago, having come out in 1998…
This strange film hinges on a strange number of nexus moments, but mostly is meant to be the three or more outcomes of what Barbara decides on a particular day. Does she Commit the Perfect Crime, does she Call the Police or does she just Drive Away?
Sew Torn whatever its inspiration, is not a title that’s going to enter into the international vernacular, that’s for certain. We are not going to have politicians or writers in the New Yorker refer to a “Sew Torn moment” in their lives, where they had the option to commit a crime capitalising on someone else’s crimes, and chose not to, or not.
Or maybe it could come to mean something to do with exercising one’s super powers of mobile seamstressing in order to get out of a deadly situation.
Barbara is a mobile seamstress, in that she has a small shop in town, but also an ancient tiny car that has a giant version of a spool on the back of her car.
This small town is meant to be a small American town, but there are at least 1400 hints that this is all happening in a Swiss town somewhere in, um, Switzerland, presumably.
She is alone in this world, having lost her beloved mother, and she is going out of business. Practically her last customer is an angry Karen who’s about to get married. Second weddings have to be perfect. The button at the top / back of her dress needs to be reattached.
If anything, this is the crucial hinge moment that determines what comes next even more so than whether Barbara decides to commit fun crimes for profit and laughs. The woman is so abusive and annoying that in some of the scenarios Barbara lets the button fall into a heating duct deliberately, once accidentally, and one time she takes her time and stops it.
Minor variations, maximum results.
It’s not ultimately just about making “right” choices, it’s mostly about making dumb choices (especially in the first scenario) that cascade and snowball and result in absolute carnage and death for the most people possible. It’s not entirely about morality, though. Sometimes the choices are immoral and end poorly, in others you might think she’s taking a more principled stance, and those go even worse. In some she tries to use her supernatural skill with needle and thread to engineer an outcome, and it’s thwarted because she hasn’t factored in some random element that will make it all go pear shaped.
Having a proprietary set of needles that have your business name engraved in them may seem like a artisanal luxury finishing touch, but it will also result in you being easy to track down when you tried to make it look like two crims killed each other by their own hand.
In all of the scenarios (except for the comically shortest, at the end), Barbara tries to use her unique set of skills to get out of almost impossible situations, like being chained to a radiator in a sheriff’s office, or under the watchful eye of a gun-wielding psychopath, and they represent scenarios so strange and needlessly complicated that maybe they were meant to be pure comedy. They were certainly, because I had not seen anyone try something like this before, this way, interesting to watch.
In others she uses needle and thread in ways so pointlessly convoluted and so difficult that you might say to yourself “you didn’t need to do that at all”. You committed to ‘needle & thread’ being your aesthetic, and maybe you over-committed, we’ll never know. It can go from new and novel and interesting to belaboured, overdone and goofy if you’re not careful. Mostly this flick sticks on the side of being somewhat intriguing, even if the structure itself had been less dependent on such a crime film cliché.
It’s also clear to me that the protagonist of all the timelines, being Barbara, has lived a sheltered life and never seen A Simple Plan, or No Country for Old Men, or any of the other multitude of films that depict honestly and accurately what happens when non-crims think they can get away with crimes better than the actual crims will.
That trick never works, no matter how adept you are with a sewing needle. Barbara thinks she can take the money from a drug deal gone wrong, and get away with it, but the crims go all nasty and make sure that’s never going to happen. Then she might think she can be as ruthless as them, and then someone as terrible as Hudson (John Lynch, you know, the shitty boyfriend from Sliding Doors?) turns up, and shows he’s capable of all sorts of evil.
And then you find out that he’s the father of one of the chaps involved in the drug deal, who bullied his son into committing crime, and that Joshua's dad (Calum Worthy), is probably going to kill everyone, especially him, and he’d be right.
It would be simple, and perhaps more enjoyable, if there was a link between what Barbara chooses to do and whether she’s doing it solely for selfish reasons or in order to help someone else out, but the flick never needs the clockwork of its universe to run so morally or so smoothly. Random shit happens, people forget basic pieces of information, like when the brute says he thought his son was going to betray him, and so he put a bomb in the money case, and outcomes ‘happen’ to people regardless of whether they might deserve it or not.
Just like life, I guess. Maybe there’s a case to be made that the more Barbara tries to pull on the strings of fate, of destiny, in order to change her fate, the worse the outcomes seem to be, but I wouldn’t even argue it’s as straightforward as that.
It does result in an amazing dance scene where she strings threads throughout a room in order to engineer an outcome that stretches all plausibility, but at least it looks intricate and hilarious.
The adherence to the odd aesthetic is so singular that it’s almost like watching somehow exhibit their unembarrassed passion for something they really fixated on in filmic form, at least while they were making the flick. I guess if this director and production team only make needle and thread based existential thrillers exclusively it’s going to look even weirder, but I have lots of capacity for weird. After watching so many legions of films, your eyeballs, your soul, sometimes they crave something new.
This was odd enough, and quirky enough that it maintained my interest throughout. I can’t say I was overly emotionally invested in the stories or the outcomes, but it did enough to engage with me. Barbara’s bigger problem beyond finances and crime is that she has bound herself to this town because she’s incapable of accepting her mother’s death, and maybe in some other scenarios and variations she found a way to not die and to resolve herself to be free in the world somewhere else.
All things are possible, and yet still most of the threads she could follow to a different fate lead to death. It’s almost like the cosmic system is rigged against us.
An odd, and for me oddly enjoyable ‘little’ movie.
7 times I missed my train the other morning and then got run over by the Spanish Inquisition, which no-one was expecting, out of 10
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“If I were to tell you why I did what I did when I was broke and alone, would you pity me? Or would you say that my actions were justified?” – we were all just working our way through college, at some stage - Sew Torn
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