Dir. Grace Rex

The Shadow Wrangler sits at the precarious juncture between erotic fantasy and embittering reality. In Grace Rex’s short film, “36 year-old freelancer” Nan, a frustrated creative who narrates erotic novels for a living, has a confrontation with the “residual discomforts” of her recent miscarriage. The sailor-mouthed Nan appears to have been hardened by the experience, although it’s quite possible that the gruffness that hangs about her like smog has always been a defining trait of hers. Her soft-spoken ex-boyfriend Bobby, on the other hand, is so gentle in his request for closure that it is hard to believe that they ever made a good match. Not that there’s anything wrong with this reversal of traditional roles. In fact, Rex’s subtle touch, evidently weaned on a diet of 70s psychothriller and the more recent feminist revival of the genre, hints that Nan is aching for permission to dismiss her abortive relationship and pregnancy with a masculine shrug of the shoulders. She wants to grant herself this permission, but something holds her back.

We soon understand what separates Nan from the closure she craves: erotic fantasy. Through a series of dream-like sequences that accompany Nan’s narration of the erotic Western she has been assigned to record, the tale of a beautiful damsel pursued by a bloodlusting cowboy warps according to the dictates of Nan’s mind. While the characters in the novel at first appear slightly miffed that their actions keep being interrupted by noisy disturbances in Nan’s apartment, the barrier between fiction and reality is soon transgressed altogether. A rabbit found on the ranch in the novel hops out of Nan’s impromptu recording studio as she attends to Bobby, who has returned to her apartment to debrief the miscarriage. Nan dismisses the nightmarish end to her pregnancy as a “totally normal night sleep” because she would lose face to admit that it deeply affected her. The trite but effective visual analogy of empty apartment to womb encircles the fact that Nan is reeling from the loneliness within. Perhaps Bobby was not the best partner for her, but her void has to be filled somehow.  

As though to flirt with this idea, Nan fantasizes herself into the fictional plane of the novel, cavorting with every character we have thus encountered in the film’s most phantasmagoric sequence. As Nan approaches a climax that will end in tears, her housecat preys upon the rabbit that has escaped from its fantastical confines. We don’t fault Nan for going through a rolodex of grotesque sexual positions with the other characters, just as she does not fault her cat for ravaging the furry intruder. By blurring this story-within-a-story scaffolding, Rex asks us to consider: does the instrument of fiction complicate and expand desire, or does it flatten it, turning it into little more than animalism? How do we (as women, of course) contend with these contradictory impulses that simultaneously pull us towards hardened perseverance and arousing resignation? Just as it is about to boil over with tension, the film ends with the phantom presence of the eponymous Shadow Wrangler forcing entry into Nan’s apartment through the front door that mysteriously will not remain locked. 

There’s no one there for Nan to be afraid of, “nothing to see” except shadows, as the voiceover intones. The fictional is finally stripped away, and Nan’s real experiences of fear and abjection create a looming emptiness that furnishes her with a self-made terror so palpable that it might as well be reality. The ending is a bit underdetermined, not quite coming to this conclusion so much as gesturing to it, but any doubts that the audience has about the themes in which Rex seeks to traffic are soon clarified by the expertly chosen song that plays over the credits. “I always wanted a bad boy,” the voice sings, “but now I’m the bad boy.”