Pin-Up
2018 · 20m · USA
Directed by Liz Lachman
An uninspired, celebrated middle-aged photographer becomes dangerously obsessed with a young waitress who saved her life, seeing in her the perfect muse — and pulls away from her husband, her work, and the people who love her in the process.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a feature script compressed into 19 minutes that could've been a predictable psychological thriller, but instead Lachman weaponizes pin-up aesthetics to flip the male gaze on its head — the obsession becomes formally inescapable, which is a genuinely subversive move most scouts would've missed.
The visual vocabulary borrowed from calendar photography creates a rigorous formal constraint that elevates what could be a character study into something architecturally considered; pairing that with an original score shows a filmmaker thinking about the entire sensory lineage of how image and sound collaborate to seduce and trap us.
The decision to score this with a song written specifically for the film rather than existing music creates an unsettling intimacy that mirrors the photographer's unhealthy investment—it's a small choice that transforms the piece from competent to genuinely disquieting.
Reviews
Psychological, haunting.
Festivals
- Los Angeles FEEDBACK Film Festival 2018
- Bowery Film Festival 2018