Esme, My Love

“You won’t be my little girl forever,” observes Hannah, wistfully.

“Isn’t that a good thing?” Esme asks.

The process of coming of age is often treated in cinema as a liberating, albeit somewhat awkward experience. There will always be some people, however, for whom it happens far too soon and in circumstances which they would never wish to repeat. Esme (Audrey Grace Marshall) is a child when her mother takes her into the woods. She won’t be when – if – she comes out again.

Opening on the car journey to that remote locale, Cory Choy’s nervy thriller gives us very little context, immediately plunging us into the moment. Hannah (Stacey Weckstein) is driving; Esme is lounging in the back seat, bored, verbally sniping in the way that bored children do. Her mother has told her that she’s ill and that they don’t have much time left together, but Esme doesn’t feel ill. She is tired, and she wants to go home, not on some stupid road trip. Her grandparents’ farm, evidently full of meaning for Hannah, doesn’t sound very interesting to her. She’s weirded out that not until now has she been told anything about her mother’s sister, Emily, who lived at the farm. It’s an early indication of erratic behaviour on her mother’s part which unsettles her, puts her on her guard even though she lacks the experience to make useful guesses about what might be going on.

They drive through the night. Esme falls asleep, and when the car stops, Hannah gazes at her lying there, marvelling at her small, perfect form the way parents often do with their children when they can get away with it. Esme doesn’t want that kid of attention, having reached an age where she’s uncomfortable with ‘the clingy thing’. Yet there’s something about Hannah’s gaze which feels off. She seems to be weighing something up in her mind, almost as if she’s trying to evaluate the child’s comparative worth. One feels that she is on the edge of doing something dangerous.

We will spend the whole of this film with just the two of them, though each will imagine that she sees somebody else, and once they reach the farm there will be the haunting presence of Emily to contend with. Hannah’s not-so-bright idea to eat some canned peaches which she finds there, insisting that such things never go off, results in both of them getting food poisoning, an invitation to wonder how much of what follows is a fever dream. This incident also gives us an early chance to observe how Esme behaves when left to her own devices. She’s a smart, resourceful kid. As well as getting organised and feeding herself, she looks after her mother. One wonders how long that has been going on for, on one level or another.

Much of the film is spent simply wandering about in the woods, but the tension remains. Choy deftly captures the separateness of Hannah and Esme’s experiences, something which the former seems to struggle to recognise or accept. When Esme, admiring a lake from a little wooden jetty, loses her footing and falls into the water, there’s a shift in the mood, Hannah’s behaviour making it clear that something is very seriously wrong. There is ambiguity as to whether the cause is supernatural or purely psychological, but whichever is the case, Esme gradually realises that she will need to look out for herself.

For a low budget film shot in the woods, Esme, My Love, looks very impressive. Simple but well thought-out tricks like colour coordination give it an elegance which really elevates it. Hannah and Esme have clothes, backpacks and sleeping bags in shades of dark blue and mustard. The farmhouse is painted pale blue with a tawny roof, and the same colours are replicated perfectly in the shadowy woods and sunset in the final shot. Reflections are also used very effectively in small ways, helping build up a sense of paranoia. The trees themselves contribute to an atmosphere of containment. Hannah is obsessed with digging, boring down into the leaf mould and the earth below. Esme, like a young sapling striving to catch its share of sunlight, knows that she needs to get out, to reach the safety of open spaces and a clear sky.

A smart little film which flirts with horror tropes as a means of exploring a troubled mother/daughter relationship, Esme, My Love doesn’t always get the balance right, but it’s much better than its lowly origins suggest, and it promises a bright future for its director and stars.