Drowned Lands Part 3: You Are With Me
2015 · 7m · USA
Directed by Will Schluter
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: melancholic, mythic
Part three, and the longest installment yet: the woman addresses someone who isn't there — a partner, a ghost, an absence the series refuses to name. Whether 'you' is comfort or hallucination is the only question that matters, and Schluter refuses to answer it.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
This is where most grief shorts collapse into a monologue and a tasteful score. Schluter does the opposite — the 'you' is never identified, never resolved, and the longer the silence holds, the more dangerous the second person gets.
The miniseries' pivot from solitude to second-person address — Schluter refuses to name 'you,' which is the only honest move. Marie Howe in motion, more or less.
The grammatical pivot from solitude to second-person address as the series' structural move is the kind of thing only a wordless miniseries can really pull off. Whether 'you' is comfort or hallucination is exactly the question to leave open.