A Film a Week - I Watched Her Grow

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

There is an extremely morbid joke and it goes like this. A teenager comes back home from school and smells something odd. “Mom, what’s that smelling like a rotting corpse? Mom? Mom?! MOM!!!”

The opening scene of Shea Formanes’ debut feature I Watched Her Grow is somewhat akin to that joke, as the teenage protagonist Ada (Michelle Colman Padron) comes back from the school wanting to start the conversation with her mother Mirren (Eloisa Cardona) only to receive no answer before finding her dead. The thing is, Mirren was not a regular human, but an entity crossed between a plant and a human, so her existence was known only to her daughter who centred her life around caring for her, and to their only friend, the local shopkeeper Inez (Aarti Tiwari).

Seven years later, Ada still has trouble adjusting to the life without her mother in the picture. Until one day she finds a troubled teenager Wren (Taylor Freeman) by the stream in the woods. She insists on helping her and, albeit facing some resistance in the beginning, takes her in to her home. However, the two young women are connected in some ways that could be described as supernatural.

Genre-wise, I Watched Her Grow can be described as an artsy coming of age drama laced with science fiction and fantasy wrapped in a fairy tale, which is quite an ambitious concept. Even more so if we are aware that the whole project is realized with the budget of only $10.000 and with the cast and crew consisting of non-professionals and newcomers. Formanes plots the story and times the big revelations in a sure-handed manner, aiming for parables that are not so easy to achieve even for the more experienced filmmakers. However, not all the intended parables are driven safely home, but that also comes with the territory of a young filmmaker doing a debut feature on a shoestring budget and packing it in the 67-minute format.

On the other hand, the filmmaker leads her inexperienced actresses to the emotional debts and achieves the palpable chemistry between them. That especially stands for the two leads, Michelle Colman Padron and Taylor Freeman who are forming a strong on-screen bond.

However, the technical aspects of the film leave much to be desired. The cinematography by Jen Au is quite flat, there is not even a hint of colour grading, while the editing done by a team of people including the filmmaker herself is also quite choppy. There is even a sense of time-stretching in that department with all the inserts of textual cards and longer stretches of blacked-out screen for no dramaturgical purposes. The weakest component is probably the sound that is so uneven that it renders certain parts of the dialogue inaudible.

In the end, I Watched Her Grow seems like a work of a talented and inspired amateur, or an aspiring filmmaker in desperate search for the proper funding and a proper crew. Maybe it would be easier and more effective for Formanes to have either stayed in the short format while simplifying the plot, or waited for more time to raise more funds to at least shoot some more material. This way, it all seems a bit like a compromise, but a respectable one that needs to be encouraged in order to let the future auteur grow.