Pretty sure I’ve said nearly the exact words about other films like Machination: if this were a half-hour episode of an anthology series, say Twilight Zone – it would have been a worthwhile view.
Instead, even the short one hour runtime tests the boundaries of our curious patience.
A young woman comes home from somewhere. She first steps into a pan of water upon entry, then goes to the bathroom to wash her hands. The camera holds steady as she washes, and washes, and washes…and washes.
Then she scrubs the floors and—okay, we get it. She’s apparently in a pandemic and has OCD, which must be the worst possible combination. Our empathy is with the character, Maria (Steffi Thake) as she worries and squirms and calls out sick again to a boss who is losing patience.
She ventures out to the desolate bus stop shelter, only to see a man not wearing a mask and coughing – sending her running back to her desolate apartment, where she must go through the same rituals of washing and washing and…well, you know.
Co-directors Sarah Jayne and Ivan Malekin finally begin to give the viewer a few more hints that Maria’s inner anguish: her flashes of a childhood trauma, mixed with apparent hallucinations of worms, lots of worms, are either the cause of her self-isolation or have been exacerbated by a lockdown that has left her alone to her debilitating thoughts.
Either way, the poor young lady is not well, and seeing her suffer in slow motion turns out to be not so cinematic. There are many studies about why solitary confinement (like a prisoner’s) is devastating to the mind – the puzzle of this short film is which came first, the psychosis or the “lock down?”
It’s an interesting point to ponder for about a half hour. But this film is one hour long.
Machination is available now. Click here: https://www.nexusproductiongroup.com/machination