Slash FF Review: Unwell Woman (2024)
Slash Film Festival
Fantastic Shorts Competition
The year is 1979. A curly-haired “Unwell Woman” enters the Cambridge library to explore what Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer wrote about hysteria. She takes her place at a corner desk and pulls out a book and a wooden pencil case, appearing perfectly prepared for a long night of study. And yet, distractions keep creeping in: her pen is missing from her case, a fellow library-goer several rows behind clatters with her pencil, and… she unexpectedly discovers a photograph of her mother tucked in her bag.
Daniella DeVinter, the Anglo-Danish filmmaker, who, by her own admission, has an “unhealthy interest” in stories of sickness and obsession, takes viewers on a hysteria-driven ride through the meanders of Freudian theory and feminine trauma. Her third short, “Unwell Woman”, premiered at the Cambridge Film Festival in 2024 and is set to screen at the Slash Film Festival in Vienna in 2025. A Gothic psychodrama cloaked in dark academia aesthetics, the film portrays female hysteria through both theoretical narrative and visual expression.
Set in the 70s, the film both honours and teases the cinema from that era – an acknowledged influence on DeVinter’s imagination – while standing firm as a commentary on how misdiagnosis and ignorance sustained generations of women’s suffering, all labelled simply as “hysteria”. DeVinter’s meticulous attention to detail shines in flower bell-bottom trousers, thick-framed glasses, or a chequered-pattern thermos that looks lifted straight from a grandmother’s cupboard. Yet what hypnotises most is the story within the story: a cut-out animation on a blue background, echoing the mother’s past as well as the shared experience of women who have always been considered a little too “unwell”. Told by the literal painting that hangs in the library, this inner narrative only fuels the heroine’s growing hysteria.
With “Unwell Woman”, DeVinter aims to convey the unsettling feeling of being in the dark about one’s own body. As night falls in the library, the lights go out, and faceless creatures discuss Freud’s misogynistic theories with the main character, she achieves this aim almost perfectly. And since, in the past, there was only one way to “cure” women’s hysteria, viewers are left on pins and needles, hoping for a different outcome. But… could that have been possible in 1979 Cambridge?
Original title: Unwell Woman
Runtime: 14’
Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
Year: 2024
Directed by: Daniella DeVinter
Written by: Daniella DeVinter
Producer: Daniella DeVinter
Cinematography: Zeb Goriely, Gabriel Johnson
Editing: Daniella DeVinter
Costumes: Abdullah Kahn
Visual effects: Rishandé van Der Merwe, Taylor Vaux-Nobes
Animation: Penelope Whitehouse
With: Lydia Maria Makrides, Jack Medlin, Daniella DeVinter, James Bryden Rodgers
