dir. Jessica Barr

Jessica Barr’s Tight is a brutally effective masterclass in storytelling—not a single scene is wasted. The film follows a nameless woman, who shall hence be referred to as the Wife (played by Fabianne Gstottenmayr), and her newfound inability to achieve sexual pleasure after childbirth. It should be noted that this is not really a film about motherhood; the child is mostly incidental, and only appears in the final scene. What the film is about is trust and betrayal, a horrific patriarchal “treatment,” and an unexpected amount of plastic wrap.

The film opens to a doctor’s clinic. The Wife and the Husband (Elliot Gross) sit together, hands clasped so very tightly, as a doctor—white, male—asks them questions. The Husband always answers. Meanwhile, the Wife is visibly distraught, teetering on the edge of an anxiety attack, her breathing coming in rapid-fire bursts until the Husband is asked to leave. He does, ungraciously, until the doctor emerges and asks What about you? Are you in any discomfort?

A faint trace of shame, perhaps—as the Husband admits It’s the best it’s ever been.

We discover that for the Wife, sex is now a chore, an unpleasant duty that causes her nothing but pain. The Husband is aware enough of this to feel guilty about it, but not, of course, to stop having sex with her. Her face twists and contorts as his eases into pleasure. She shoves him away when he’s done. Even solo masturbation is ruined for her. She feels the loss intently—she watches happy couples hold each other in public with the keenness of a hawk.

The only kind of gratification that the Wife displays is when she wraps something in plastic wrap. We watch her cocoon pillows and benches in lifeless plastic, running her hand lovingly along the trussed-up furniture and closing her eyes in the first real pleasure we see from her in the film. She finds relief when things are bound, inert, protected. Kept whole. A barrier wrapped tightly between the object and the world, one that she controls.

She goes to another doctor.

This one is a gynaecologist, a woman of colour. It seems significant that this is the first character who truly empathises with the Wife—the American medical system is infamous for accumulating accusations of misogynoir, after all—and the first person who tells her the truth. I’m sorry. In the Wife’s most vulnerable moment, a birth in which she has already confessed to being so heavily medicated that she doesn’t remember it —her husband had requested the doctor do something unforgivable.

It is not mentioned by name in the film, simply explained. The husband stitch. A woman is sewn up after she tears during birth, a routine medical procedure; but might the Husband ask there to be an extra stitch or two put in? A little tightening of the laces, so to speak. So things go back to normal in the bedroom, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, and hey, maybe they’ll be even better than before? A man can dream.

And the doctors, already shown in the film to be so concerned with the comfort of men, of course comply. What’s the harm? The woman—unconscious, exhausted, recovering from one of the most agonising things the human body can experience—probably won’t even notice. Best not to tell them. You know how they are. There’s no real harm, remember?

Except, not quite, as the gynaecologist explains.

The husband stitch can cause extreme pain during intercourse, and the effects are not reversible. The Wife is visibly dazed with the slow-dawning realisation of betrayal. What happened to her was no medical mishap; it was deliberate, and this recontextualizes every encounter we’ve seen between her and the Husband. The film ramps up the tension with a soundtrack as eerie as it is simple; the repeated chime of a bell.

We are reminded of that quote about the bell tolling, and who it might toll for…

The Husband returns to a house that has been bound in an excess of plastic wrap. The lampshade, the table, the counter. A thread of unease creeps in, until lust burns it away; the Wife emerges, the perfect image of a dominatrix but for the odd look on her face, as tightly clad in latex as the furniture in plastic.

She backs him into a chair, ties his arms and his legs together with her faithful plastic wrap. When he tries to speak, she hushes him, in a beautiful reversal of the first scene where he spoke over her at every opportunity. The panic does not truly kick in until she wraps his face. Finally, it is the Husband’s turn to be breathless and helpless, to be betrayed in a moment of intimacy. The film ends on a good-for-her note as we see her turn and walk away, baby safe in her arms, her control finally regained.

For such a short film, the characters are impressively vivid, the messages of patriarchy and control clearly present without slipping into melodrama. You’ll want to reach into the screen to comfort Gstottenmayr’s Wife when the gynaecologist tells her what has been done to her; you’ll want her to hear you cheering through the screen when she gets her revenge, too. A tightly-plotted—pardon the pun—feminist horror film with fantastic direction and acting.