Sew Torn – Glasgow Film Festival 2025 Review
Barbara (Eve Connolly) is an American seamstress living and working in Switzerland (for never disclosed reasons). On the way back to her home from seeing a nightmare client, she comes across the end result of a drug deal gone bad in the middle of a road. Two men are sprawled out, grievously wounded but alive, and there’s a suitcase of money between them. Barbara mulls her choices. Should she take the money, and engineer it to look like the two men killed each other? Should she phone the police? Or should she just drive away? In Sliding Doors/Run Lola Run style, we follow through what would happen with each decision. As we learn in the very first scene, the results are all disasters – and so is the movie.
It’s honestly hard to know where to begin. Our protagonist is as good a place as any. Listlessly played by Eve Connolly, Barbara has two solitary traits: her mother has recently died, and she is freakishly good at sewing. There is nothing more to her than that, which makes it nigh on impossible to root for, or be invested in, her various predicaments – and a lot of this film involves us caring what she does!
The USP here is the thread-themed Rube Goldberg devices that Barbara conjures up to both kill her enemies, and escape from sticky situations – one thread will pull another and then another, and at the end, a gun goes off, etc. The first time we see this happen, there is at least some novelty, though the sequence is cut with little regard to a cause and effect logic, which saps much of the potential fun out of it (see the best death from Final Destination 2 for how to do Rube Goldberg machines right). By the third or fourth time it happens, it’s boring. When your whole film is built around the extravagant conceit, it’s baffling how the execution could end up so messy.
But then, there are a lot of baffling things about Sew Torn. For one, pretty much the very first thing we see is the final frame of each of the decisions that Barbara takes; we see them again at the beginning of each subsequent section of the movie. If you have somehow managed to work up an interest in her and her two character traits, that we are shown what’s going to happen in all the potential timelines totally saps them of any tension.
Less important, but still noteworthy enough to be distracting: why is the movie set in Switzerland? The protagonist and antagonist are both Americans (though the actors are Irish), another main character is English. Beyond cinematography, there are no narrative reasons for the Swiss setting – at one point Schnitzel is eaten, but it’s not exactly an important plot point. While it’s hardly the film’s biggest issue, not even giving us a throwaway line to explain how all these disparate people ended up in this Alpine village is symptomatic of a grating lack of care for detail.
Another bad choice, in a movie overflowing with them.
★
