Sew Torn review – seamstress thriller turns into Run Lola Run-style alternative-reality caper
Thread-slingers with an addiction to YouTube tutorials (like me) may have seen an amusing film by seamstress/historian Bernadette Banner in which she reacts to a bunch of films that feature actors sewing, or at least pretending to sew. Examples include How the Grinch Stole Christmas (not convincing) to The Phantom Thread (mostly bang on, featuring real dressmakers at work). Each one is picked apart with waspish scrutiny by Banner, who can spot the difference between a vintage treadle-operated chain stitch machine and a lockstitch machine from different periods in the 19th-century. Hopefully Banner will get a chance to scrutinise this loosely sewing-themed thriller and nitpick its faux pas, such as the bit where the seamstress protagonist Barbara (Eve Connolly) seems to sew a button on a client's wedding dress in less than a minute. (No thread shank? Shocking!)
In fact, it is clear co-writer-director Freddy Macdonald is more interested in sewing equipment, especially thread reels and needles, rather than sewing per se. The conceit is that Barbara, a shy American woman running a sewing supply shop and mobile seamstress business in Switzerland after the death of her mother, comes across the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. In Run Lola Run-style, the film shows us three different outcomes, each based on whether Barbara chooses to commit the perfect crime, call the police, or run away. In nearly all she uses reels of Mettler thread to rig up pulleys and other simple machines to create booby traps or retrieve useful objects, little Heath Robinson-like contraptions that aren't quite traced out in enough detail to be persuasive. Drug deal-participants Joshua (Calum Worthy) and Beck (Thomas Douglas) are sometimes her allies and other times her antagonists, but in each timeline she must contend with psychopathic kingpin Hudson (John Lynch, the best thing in the film), doing extreme bad parenting as he bullies his son Joshua.
Like the thread contraptions and what little sewing we see, the comedy is a bit, well, threadbare, while the full garment of the film lacks the finishing on the seams that would make it satisfying and professional-looking. There are just too many loose ends, in every sense, when this kind of black comic farce needs to run with the precision of a Bernina sewing machine – which is prominently featured here in a plausible bit of product placement. If there's a sequel, Macdonald should consider hiring Banner as a consultant.
Sew Torn is on digital platforms from 31 March.
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