Chained for Life

A film is being shot in an abandoned hospital. It is the English language debut of a European director and the subject is a kind of art horror. A well known actress has the lead: Mabel. Opposite her is Rosenthal, a quiet, gentle man with a severe facial deformity. The other parts on the set have gone to actors with different bodies as well. Mabel keeps trying to connect and every attempt goes a little more wrong. Aaron Schimberg writes and directs. Jess Weixler plays Mabel and Adam Pearson plays Rosenthal, with Stephen Plunkett, Charlie Korsmo and Sari Lennick. The subject is cinema itself. The narrative moves constantly between the set and the film, and which scene is a take and which is real is left deliberately unclear. Its matter is representation. How cinema has used different bodies for a century, how the horror genre rests on that, and how good intentions can also be a form of exploitation are taken on directly. Adam Pearson is an actor with neurofibromatosis who had appeared in Under the Skin; he later worked with Schimberg again on A Different Man. The tone sits between dry comedy and discomfort; the film offers no emotional resolution anywhere. The title refers to a 1952 film in which real conjoined twins appeared. Who it is for: viewers who follow cinema about cinema and the argument about representation. Who it is not for: the narrative is deliberately scattered, the pace is slow, and the film does not let the viewer settle.