Deep Tissue: Final Girls Berlin Review

If you have ever been on the receiving end of a sports massage and been left thinking “That really fucking hurt, but I feel better for it.” Then you can probably hazard a guess at the inspiration for Meredith Alloway’s horror short Deep Tissue.

Deep Tissue features Peter Vack, a Robert Pattinson/Steve Harrington mashup, as the unnamed man who pays a visit to an unnamed woman played by Alloway herself. She explores the awkwardness and embarrassment, covered by false bravado, stemming from the uncertainty around how the encounter is supposed to play out.

Deep Tissue is body-horror with a whimsical side. It is standalone, but could have fit as one storyline within a larger series of vignettes, with strong echoes of Miranda July–particularly with regard to clumsy interaction between strangers and the potential for violent acts (see July’s The Future, 2011; Me and You and Everyone we Know, 2005).

Alloway displays an interest in the relationship between pleasure and pain, and horror within daylight/ordinary activities. Another of her films, Ride, is set in a nightmarish spin class.

Meredith Alloway is a producer and director, known for Deep Tissue (2019), Interior Teresa (2016) and Mutt (2017).

Final Girls Berlin Film Festival showcases horror cinema that’s directed, written, or produced by women and non-binary filmmakers. We are committed to creating space for female voices and visions, whether monstrous, heroic or some messy combination of the two, in the horror genre. We’ve seen more than enough representations of women as beautified victims and constructions of male fantasies or anxieties, and are working towards the primacy of women as subjects and storytellers in horror.

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