Wavering
2019 · 11m · United States
Directed by Jordan Gustafson
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A National Parks Ranger with intensifying Parkinson's disease struggles to accept her new limitations.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a grief film dressed as a disability film, which is fine, but there's nothing here that makes me lean forward—just competent emotional archaeology that a hundred other shorts have already excavated.
Gustafson works in the lineage of the intimate disease drama with admirable restraint; the formal choices feel earned, and there's a clear conversation happening with films like Reichardt's approach to landscape as emotional mirror.
The film's real weapon is how it refuses to score the decline—there's a particular coldness to how it frames her body against the park's permanence, and that tonal choice, sustained throughout, is what transforms what could've been maudlin into something genuinely unsettling.