Sawdust
2022 · 12m · USA
Directed by Blake Winston Rice
Tones: contemplative, tense
An absentee mother, in the midst of a bitter fight with her ex-husband, finds herself at the center of a horrific workplace accident — forcing her to reckon with what truly matters.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A single-take dramatic thriller that bets everything on one unbroken performance — an audacious formal gamble from an emerging New Jersey writer-director worth tracking.
Another single continuous take pinned to a workplace accident — Russian Ark to Safdie is a wild span to invoke for a twelve-minute Vimeo upload with 2,984 views. Skeptical.
Twelve-minute one-take placing the full dramatic weight on a single unbroken performance is an honest formal bet, though the workplace-accident-as-moral-clarifier premise risks the kind of tidy catharsis the form should be testing against. Hinges entirely on Piazza.