SXSW 2024 Review: SEW TORN, An Enchantingly Whimsical Rube Goldberg Action Thriller

A struggling seamstress plays a dangerous real life choose-your-own-adventure game in Freddy Macdonald’s debut feature, the whimsical comedic thriller Sew Torn.

Barbara Duggen’s (Eve Connolly) sewing shop in an idyllic hamlet in the picturesque Swiss Alps is on the rocks. Having recently lost her mother, the business is on it’s way out with Barbara struggling to make ends meet by operating mostly as an emergency mobile seamstress. When the high maintenance client at her latest gig pops a button, Barbara must rush back to her shop to replace it, but what she encounters on the way could potentially change her life, but only if she plays it just right.

While rushing back through mostly empty mountain roads, she comes across a drug deal gone bad. Both parties are badly injured and attempting to finish them job while big bags of cocaine litter the road. Among the debris is a briefcase full of cash, Barbara must make a decision on the spot, will she commit the perfect crime, call the police, or just walk away. How about all three? Sew Torn utilizes the Run Lola Run game of playing out each possibility to its Rube Goldberg like end in a delightfully imaginative adventure that may turn out to be among the buzziest titles at this year’s SXSW.

Sew Torn is adapted from a 2019 short film, but I cannot imagine that format truly doing justice to what Maconald has in store for audiences here. Co-written by his father, Fred Macdonald, young Freddy displays an abundance of creative skill and craft in the execution of this convoluted tale of a criminal novice attempting to utilize her unique skill set to perhaps pull her failing business out of a terminal tailspin. The results are wonderfully unexpected, with Barbara’s adventures growing more bizarre by the minute, and the outcomes are never what she – nor we – could ever have expected.

Sew Torn is a relatively small production, a primary cast of half a dozen actors take up most of our screen time, with the marvelous Alps vistas accounting for a great deal of the production value. But the real magic is in the thread. Barbara – and by extension the Macdonalds – show a remarkable ingenuity with thread, each of the three segments, which reset following the conclusion of the prior, display dazzling skills with needles, spindles, and somehow even guns. This is where Sew Torn distinguishes itself from any comparisons that may come up about the above-mentioned Tykwer film or any others that are bound to come up when referencing the film’s overall aesthetic.

There’s a tranquility to the setting that makes the juxtaposition of the violence and mayhem that follows each of Barbara’s attempts to find her happy ending work so well. Sew Torn has the visual vibe of a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film, even a touch of that filmmaker’s trademark whimsy, but with a more action heavy tone that is enough to differentiate Sew Torn from its many influences. This is a film tailor-made (pun intended) for adventurous genre film audiences, and it can definitely look forward to a solid life on the festival circuit if it isn’t snapped up by one of the more adventurous distributors before that can happen.

Every year at SXSW we come across a title that wasn’t initially on the genre radar, but winds up blowing us away. Joining the ranks of 2022’s The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic and 2023’s Chronicles of a Saint, Sew Torn has so far taken that crown. Cutesy enough to appeal to a broad audience, dark enough to appeal to the genre film crowd, and creatively executed in such a way that it’s impossible to ignore the vision behind it, Sew Torn is a charmer that announces Freddy Macdonald as a talent worth watching out for.