(Esteemed fancy lad Jon Partridge reviewed this one out of Fantastic Fest)
Like if Lisa Frank redecorated Grey Gardens, Pin Cushion’s jaunty art scheme and twee visuals are a smokescreen for a deeply sad, Gothic-flavored meditation on loneliness and the bonds between mothers and daughters. Pin Cushion is a tiny little thing of a movie, but for the right audiences, its small barbs will lacerate the heart.
As the film starts, teenaged Iona (Lily Newmark) and her mother Lyn (Joanna Scanlan) move into a new town, brimming with optimism for the chance at a new life. There’s a vague sense that the pair are fleeing from some unspecified trauma or tragedy, fixing wide smiles to their faces as if they were masks covering endless howls of pain.
Hunchbacked, uneven-footed Lyn moves through the world in a permanent flinch, constantly bracing for the physical or verbal assault that is always just around the corner. When they arrive in town, mother and daughter are closer than can possibly be considered healthy, so when Iona begins experimenting with teenaged rebellion (chasing after boys, falling in with the local mean girls), it devastates Lyn in ways that she can hardly articulate. When those experiments start turning up sour results, it tests the limits of both women and injects their relationship with a toxicity that may ruin everything they have together.
Writer-director Deborah Haywood sets much of the film within the cramped confines of Iona and Lyn’s house. The onslaught of Day Glo bright walls and masses of felt and porcelain oddities that Lyn stuffs into every inch of the space gives the house a claustrophobic, suffocating feel. When characters besides the central mother and daughter enter the house, it can feel as if they’ve wandered into another time, or another world.
Which is only fitting, because neither Iona nor Lyn really lives in the ‘real’ world, so to speak. Both concoct elaborate other lives that they claim to be living, at first as a means of protecting each other and themselves, and later as part of kind of cruel game of one-upmanship. Iona’s fantasies are depicted in lo-fi surreal visions, often featuring the vision of the beautiful flight attendant that she has claimed is her real mother.
It would be very easy for all this to reach twee-overload, or for the film to come across as Wes Anderson-lite, but the difference is that Anderson and his imitators find great beauty in their closed off, symmetrical worlds. Haywood knows that her characters are deeply hurting, and the endless procession of cuddly toys and foodstuffs carved with smiley faces are the defensive perimeters they have put up around their own hearts.
There’s a scene early on (you’ll know it when you see it) that gives the game away pretty much from the start. Pin Cushion reaches a peak of grotesque and misery before the 30-minute mark, and once you have that image in your mind there’s really no going back. Haywood wisely tempers the onslaught of misfortunes that befall with Lyn and Iona with a well-placed visual gag or a snappy bit of comedy, and that goes a long way to making what could have been exhausting misery porn more palatable.
That being said, even at only 80-some-odd minutes, there are stretches of Pin Cushion that begin to feel almost monotonous in their cruelty against the central duo. Lyn, especially, endures a spiritual and emotional scourging on par with a Catholic saint, and at a certain point, it becomes such a foregone conclusion that Pin Cushion is building towards a grim, uh, conclusion, that you may start to lose interest in the procession of tragedies and humiliations that are getting you there.
But Haywood surprised me on that front. While I will not reveal the ending of the film, suffice to say that Haywood reaches for grace instead of despair. The film’s ending made me reappraise both film and filmmaker, revealing not a sadist cruelly turning the screws on characters and audience, but an artist plumbing darkness and finding something soulful within.
Scanlan has been bouncing around the British film and television industry for a while (she was one of the witches in Stardust and was a longtime regular on The Thick of It), and here she pours her everything into the sad, lonely soul of Lyn. Scanlan’s eyes are the film’s greatest special effects, these giant pools of hurt and longing pleading with the world to relent this once. Lyn threatens to cross over from pitiful to pitiable at points, but Scanlan maintains a kind of rumpled dignity that keeps you squarely in her corner as the film proceeds.
Newmarket is newer to the scene, but she makes a strong impression as Iona. Like Scanlan, Newmarket can convey entire pages of dialogue in only a single stammered line, or a wounded glance, and she cuts a remarkably sympathetic figure as Iona attempts to negotiate the tangled politics of high school and teenage relationships.
Those relationships are maybe the weakest spots in the film, only because Haywood is going over familiar ground. Teenage girls tearing each other apart as casual bloodsport is a subject that has been fairly exhaustively explored, and Haywood’s script does not provide any particular fresh riffs on or insights into this particular batch of Heathers. At times, the antagonistic forces arranged against Lyn and Iona are so bluntly, nakedly evil, that it can be difficult to engage with the film or empathize with characters who just keep lining up to get laid out.
But empathize you do. Pin Cushion will not be to all tastes, but it will surely floor those audience members who find themselves on the same wavelength. When the lights came up in the theater, I noticed the woman next to me was openly weeping into the shoulder of her companion, and plenty of other people in the theater were having a similar reaction. Folks got shook.
While Pin Cushion is not without its flaws, it’s also possessed of a true sincerity, which helps a film of modest scope pack tremendous power.