Without, by Mark Jackson

WITHOUT from Without, the movie on Vimeo.

Quietness does not imply peace or serenity. The physical place does not save us. There is no valid hideout. There is no escape. When emotional pain goes beyond the barriers of our skin, we are trapped in ourselves. Without, Mark Jackson’s first feature film, is a devastating and enigmatic essay on loneliness; an introspective journey towards the primary desperation of having to live with our own suffering.

Joslyn, a 19-year-old girl, looks after an old man in vegetative state. This is the staring point of a great many counterpoints –full youth and old age; psychical and emotional pain; explicit and implicit communication– that bring about a story of existential, sexual and emotional crisis. Together with Joslyn Jensen’s relentless and sensitive performance, Without is revealed to us as a familiar and plausible story, with the protagonist torn between her own demons, her insanity and her figurative and literal isolation, immersed in a claustrophobic cinematography, in which, at any moment, ghosts can come to life.

The storyline, the exact amount of information, the precise tension, cause Joslyn’s world to be always about to explode, as if it were an extension of her own body, or her mind, or both.  Without knowing exactly in what way, or how, or why, something is being stirred up, reformulated. There is something there that is not told, that remains hidden and latent; something that appeals directly to the viewer’s emotions.

Without delicately sets up a contemplative moment, that instant in which the world seems to stop; like in a picture, or in a memory, or in a dream. Right after, everything goes on. But nothing is the same anymore. 

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