dir. Zach Green

Two young women in summer dresses dance together in a garden. It is such a familiar image of carefree joy that it almost reads as cliché—except that here the scene is painted in a gory palette of pinks and reds, evoking the interior chambers of a human heart. The dancers are photographic negatives of their real selves. So, too, are the emotions inverted in this short film about thwarted desire. Love transforms into a twisted and singular obsession. An idyllic birthday outing turns into a nightmare.

Patty (Rosalind Jackson Roe) is a woman suffocated by her own want. Still infatuated with her ex-girlfriend Elaine (Shayla Fiveland), she spends most of her time looking up her former lover on social media, tracking her every move. Her fingers trail along the static outline of Elaine’s photo on her computer. She brings her lips to the screen and inhales, as though she can breathe the other woman in through the static. She chews anxiously at her hair and seethes as she discovers that Elaine has a new girlfriend, Lauren (Laila Blue), and that it is Lauren’s birthday tomorrow. Click, click, click: a series of photographs and memories rendered in violent red.

What’s a girl to do who’s in love with her ex? The boring answer is “go to therapy and get back on the apps.” Patty chooses a more unusual course of action: she casts a spell, ties herself to her bed, and wakes up not just in another room, but in another person. Patty’s consciousness now inhabits Lauren’s body, sprawled out in Elaine’s sun-drenched bed. Lauren, somewhere across town, wakes up in Patty’s body, bound and unable to leave her grim little apartment. Director Zach Green knowingly juxtaposes Patty-as-Lauren writhing in pleasure as she and Elaine make love with Lauren-as-Patty straining against her bonds, weeping as ropes cut into her wrists.

“My hair was soft. My skin was glowing.  I was who I always wanted to be,” Patty says. The camera glides along her hands entwined with Elaine’s, their bodies fit snugly into one another. This, then, is who Patty has always wanted to be: the person who is with Elaine. There is no room in her for any other kind of desire.

The resulting montage is what sapphic daydreams are made of—a breakfast carefully prepared by a lover, a sunlit walk along a riverbank, a perfect, thoughtful gift. But Elaine’s face becomes increasingly troubled as the day goes on. She notices the sudden change in her girlfriend, the intensity of her gaze, her new habit of chewing on her hair. She knows that something is wrong. And, in a small apartment not so very far away, Lauren has pulled herself free…