There’s Something I Have to Tell You: Liberation on the Floor of an Unfurnished Living Room

Jamie Savarese’s 16-minute There’s Something I Have to Tell You runs on a tense line. A mother’s ominous tone, her cool dismissal, they bring on a looming sense of illness in the air. Despite the crisp blue sky of the Bahamas, the dazzling sun on the springy greenery, the cold weight of some yet unnamed burden on the young protagonist lends to everything a clammy feeling. 

Reagan Kelly is well cast as Anna, the daughter; her ambiguous age carries childhood trauma and earned perspective in an infinity loop where every seeming end refers both backwards and forwards. She is on new terrain, her mother’s turf, helping her build a house in the hills. The mother (Suzanne Kovi) is a towering presence, whose veneer of gentleness over hostility or indifference is so visible as to be worse than the hurt of the naked fact. This dynamic that the adult actors build justify the mere fleeting glimpses of the child Anna (Caroline Brauner, reminiscent of young Charlie in the film adaptation of The Perks of Being a Wallflower while the curtains by her quote Ratcatcher). 

The plot is thin, allowing the incidents of the story to suffuse the atmosphere with that awful feeling with which Anna grapples in and around the water: apprehension for things about to become concrete. In childhood, it was a pending move. Now, an excruciating confession snared in shame, fear, and grief. From then to the present, Anna moves with the weight of her history churning her in place.

Daniel Gierszewski, Lavar Watson, Maurice Gustave, Vance Gierszewski, and Yevener Petit Homme make up a group of workers at the house—Anna almost becomes friends with them but for her mother, wavering between wanting Anna there and barely tolerating her presence. The loneliness of it all is put into one shot: the camera leaving Anna, alone, to grow smaller and smaller in the frame as the workers drive away for the final time.

There’s Something I Have to Tell You has less to do with the confession than the havoc it wreaks on its way out of a body, sometimes worse than the origin. Time’s unfettered access to unspoken histories makes them wilt and mutate forms. The fraught climax begins to restore to mother and daughter their own access to each other. It allows the water, finally, to offer Anna liberation.

Watch There’s Something I Have to Tell You Short Film Trailer