SFF CAPSULE: Something Must Break (2014, Dir. Ester Martin Bergsmark)

After being saved from a sure and certain beating in a toilet block, Sebastian (Saga Becker) starts a intimate relationship with her saviour, Andreas (Iggy Malmborg). At first its nothing more than an obsession with the tissue she lent him, now stained with his dried blood, which she stores in her box of macabre remembrances along with a shiv and a bar of soap carved with the name of her future self, Ellie. When Sebastian does track Andreas down, he's throwing up in a local park. They share a spark nonetheless and start to hang out on the sly.

While it may not take trans drama in a new direction, Ester Martin Bergsmark's feature debut, Something Must Break (Nånting måste gå sönder), walks its familiar paths with a refreshingly different mindset. In the hands of Becker, Sebastian/Ellie is a luminous force of nature. She's a fragile, loving young woman with a cocoon spun of steel. She's searching for love in all the wrong places, satisfying her craving for tenderness with anonymous sex and golden showers. She's no victim... unless she chooses to be.

Becker and Bergsmark don't hold back. They make sure you take their film on their terms. Spending a few minutes in Sebastian's life it is easy to see why she's so aggressively defensive. She can't blend in and she can't stand out. Her relationship with "not gay" Andreas gives her some respite but his insecurities and her self pity eventually get the better of them. It's a relationship that intrigues as much as it frustrates. It's worth persevering though, behind Andreas' stonewalling and Sebastian's violent capriciousness, there are some exceptionally tender moments.

Something Must Break is a brave adventure, swapping the genre's usual sincerity for some outré angst. Bergsmark's punk aesthetic frees him up to throw style at the film with particular abandon. The look and feel of the film snaps from lush Sirkian melodrama to gruesome, hard-nosed realism and the production barely bats an eyelid. Memorable amongst the film's startling imagery are two sumptuous homages to Lars von Trier's signature slo-mo work, which manage to push the envelope in drawing beauty from unsanitary situations, and mark Bergsmark as a visual stylist to keep an eye on.

Something Must Break may be a little scattered but its fresh-faced performances, its stylish-but-not-too-stylish design and its can't-be-fucked-preaching-to-you tone should have most celebrating what it gets right instead of focussing on its missteps. Keen to see what Bergsmark comes up with next.

★★★☆

Trailer:

Something Must Break screened at Sydney Film Festival 2014.