It's Me
2020 · 15m · UK
Directed by Helen Randag
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
Set over the course of an evening, a mother revisits a private game she played with her son throughout his childhood — until he unexpectedly returns and the game's true cost is revealed.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a chamber piece about maternal guilt dressed up as a thriller—exactly the kind of formally respectable gut-punch that makes consensus critics feel smart, which means it's probably too obvious for its own good, even if the premise does have teeth.
Randag constructs a two-hander of surgical precision: the hide-and-seek game becomes a formal metaphor for emotional evasion, each reveal calibrated to deepen the psychological architecture—this sits comfortably in a lineage of intimate psychological drama that prizes emotional rigor over spectacle.
The real move here is the sustained restraint: keeping the mother's face in near-darkness during the son's return, letting the game's mechanics do the emotional work instead of performance—a single lighting choice that reframes the entire power dynamic.
Reviews
A dark tale of a game that cannot be sustained — Maxine Peake offers a profoundly beautiful performance and Russell Tovey's presence is precisely measured in the story's economy.
An intimate, unsettling meditation on motherhood, vulnerability, and the moment a child stops being a child — the message is that true connection means the sacrifice of power for vulnerability.
Festivals
- Norwich Film Festival 2020
- Manchester Film Festival 2020
- Beverly Hills Film Festival 2020
- Female Eye Film Festival 2020
- New Renaissance Film Festival 2020