SEW TORN - Mark Reviews Movies

Sew Torn, Sunrise Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 12, 2025

At the early turning point of Sew Torn, Barbara (Eve Connolly) is presented with a choice. What she actually does in that situation, apparently, doesn't matter, as an opening montage shows various levels of death and/or destruction across three possible timelines. That seems like a narrative dead end for writer/editor/director Freddy Macdonald, so it's quite a pleasant surprise that the filmmaker fills the actual plot of each segment here with some degree of imagination—as silly as some of it might be.

The gimmick of the tale is that Barbara is an expert seamstress, which gives Macdonald two separate excuses for what unfolds. The first involves that split timeline, which is envisioned during the title sequence as three distinct threads diverging from a single straightforward course. Each one, obviously, represents a choice Barbara could make when she comes across a mysterious briefcase in the middle of the road.

Oh, there are also two severely injured men crawling after or away from one another by the case, as well as a pair of pistols on the ground. Those details are somewhat important to explain why this isn't too simple or easy a decision for Barbara to make.

The other reason Barbara's profession is important is because it gives her a unique set of abilities. She is no mere seamstress but a master manipulator of the needle and thread—giving her something akin to a sort of sewing superpower. Barabara is capable of stitching exact replicas of photographs, creating a switch from a twisted braid of thread that can activate a recording, and, in the first of those three possible storylines, rigging strands and needles to pull those pistols directly into the waiting hands of the two men wanting to kill each other in the road.

Some of Macdonald's machinations here are over-the-top or downright absurd, but that's a lot of the strange fun of the film. One has to admire a hero who bases much of her cunning or means of survival on manufacturing elaborate pulley systems on the fly.

The starting point of the split narrative establishes the financial jeopardy of Barabara and her shop, located in a quaint Swiss village that is known for its stunning mountain vistas and its ability to trap tourists into becoming local (which is why everyone in town speaks English and has a variety of dialects). After the death of her beloved but strict mother, Barbara has been running this sewing shop and its mobile operation, performed with the help of a little electric car that seems a miracle every time it starts, on her own and with no plans to do anything else with her life. Now, though, the store is going out of business and Barbara has no clue what she's going to do next.

She has one appointment in the books for this day—for the third wedding of Grace (Caroline Goodall), who needs a button sewn to the back of the neck of her dress. With her customer giving her a hard time, Barbara intentionally knocks the button into an air vent out of anger, meaning she has to return to the store to retrieve another, and that's when she comes across the messy scene in the road.

There are, of course, multiple ways this could go (and could have gone before the character even finds the multiple crimes in progress), but Macdonald's script limits the resulting narrative to three possibilities: Barbara can drive away, call the cops, or come up with the "perfect crime." The film itself plays those options in the reverse order as they're listed (There's more impact in itemizing them that way, but it's more dramatic to start with, well, the most dramatic choice), but each one shares an important detail about who Barbara is and what she wants at this moment.

She's desperate and wants that briefcase, which surely is filled with money from, as the broken bags of cocaine on the road suggest, a drug deal gone wrong. How she tries to get, keep, and deal with the fallout of taking that case changes each time.

There are also more subtle details in Macdonald's screenplay, which doesn't seem to have room or patience for much subtlety as soon as Barbara sets up that ridiculous contraption to simultaneously pull a pair of pistols into a pair of hands. Each one reveals something different about a character or the situation, too, such as how the annoying client shows a more sympathetic side in only one segment, because it's the only one in which circumstances line up for her to do so.

We eventually figure out, for example why the local Sheriff (played by K Callan) is only around when Barbara calls at a very specific time in one possible story, and the relationship between Joshua (Calum Worthy), one of the drug dealers, and his boss Hudson (John Lynch), who's determined to get his briefcase, only comes to light in any meaningful way in the third potential route. The build-up to that, though, depends on Hudson being a quiet, malevolent, and brutal force in each preceding tale.

Mostly, however, Sew Torn is about Barabara (played with silent grit and a sparkle of mischief by Connolly) and her quirky talent. The latter results in some genuinely surprising makeshift tools and inventions (There's a reason only the first system portrayed in the film is detailed in this review), as well as a good amount of suspense in waiting to see how those mechanisms are going to function. It's a nifty trick of a thriller, filled with even niftier tricks of comedic invention.

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