Director Paul Holbrook tells us a dark yet ultimately hopeful story about past traumas and addiction in his latest short film, Tor Lewa. First of all, I have to say that Tor Lewa has a remarkably high level of cinematography—the kind you wouldn’t expect to see in a low-budget short film. This is supported by excellent performances as well. However, the film doesn’t achieve the same success when it comes to making clear exactly what it is trying to say.
Yes, some films simply give you the chance to witness what happens and draw your own conclusions. They even leave you with a lot of questions: “What was that?”, “Why did they say that?”, “What is this actually about?”
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But there’s an important difference between asking the audience to find the answers themselves and failing to provide enough ground for the audience to actually reach those answers. Tor Lewa occasionally falls into the latter.
Billy is a middle-aged man who has sunk into alcoholism and lives with his mother. It’s clear that he carries the weight of his past, and these traumas together with his alcohol addiction are embodied throughout the film by a wolf-like monster that follows him. It’s not hard to understand that the wolf isn’t merely a physical threat. We see that what Billy is trying to escape—his past and his addiction—has grown into a monster inside his own mind. The fact that the film’s title means “dark wolf” makes this symbolism even more obvious.
When Billy tells his mother that he is being followed by a monster, she thinks he is seeing things that aren’t real and looks for help, reaching Joanne, who runs a therapy group. Joanne first strangely claims she doesn’t know Mary. Then, on the night Billy has a breakdown in a bar, after Mary receives a phone call from the bar and goes outside, she finds Joanne at her door. Joanne admits she lied to Mary and says that the monster Billy thinks he sees is real.
This is where I started to feel a distance from the film while trying to understand what Tor Lewa was attempting to do. Because the sentence “the monster is real” inevitably makes you rethink the entire film. If the wolf is real, how much of what we’ve seen so far is a product of Billy’s mind? What does Joanne know about this monster? Why did she lie to Mary at first? And most importantly, how are we supposed to interpret the monster we’ve been seeing since the beginning of the film? When Joanne says “the monster is real,” does she mean Billy’s traumas? If so, why does she behave so suspiciously?
These are all quite intriguing questions. The problem is that after prompting us to ask them, the film doesn’t say enough for us to reach a meaningful conclusion. Ambiguity on its own isn’t a problem; when used correctly, it can even be one of a film’s greatest strengths. But here I feel the ambiguity sometimes gets in the way of the narrative rather than creating mystery.
When they go to the bar, we continue to encounter Billy’s increasingly severe hallucinations. In the end, he kills himself. The final scene that follows the film places an idea of hope against all this darkness: while Joanne continues speaking in the therapy group, Mary looks at Billy’s empty chair. Billy is no longer there, but Joanne’s words say that life goes on and that people can hold on to each other in this struggle.
Yet there’s still a side to the film that I can’t quite name. After this hopeful speech, the look on Billy’s mother’s face made me feel that the film itself doesn’t even believe these hopeful messages—and may even be criticizing them. I haven’t watched a film this hard to understand in a long time. And I can’t tell whether that’s because the film contains very deep and difficult meanings, or because it simply fails. Because Holbrook’s directing is simply excellent. The film’s atmosphere, visuals, and performances successfully convey the darkness the story carries. Despite being a low-budget short film, it is visually very confident. However, it’s hard to say that this technically immersive, magnificent world is equally solid on a narrative level.
