From Omeleto.
A woman vanishes.
HOW TO DISAPPEAR is used with permission from Milton Woods. Learn more at https://www.instagram.com/m.d._woods__.
Emma and Josh are happily ensconced in a relationship. They’re deeply in love with one another, sharing a home and life. But they have a problem: Emma disappears into thin air at unexpected moments.
She cannot control her disappearances, and soon they affect her relationship with Josh, who feels abandoned and uncertain of when she will turn back up. They break up, but even as Josh tries to move on, he tries to understand why and how his former love disappeared.
Directed and written by Milton Woods, this introspective short romance captures the dance of absence and presence in a couple’s relationship. Opening with the aftermath of a breakup, its premise evokes magical-realist stories like THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE or IN TIME, set in seemingly ordinary worlds are delicately ruptured by quietly matter-of-fact supernatural phenomena. In this case, it’s spontaneous disappearances, which are richly developed into metaphors that allow the narrative to meditate upon love, attachment and connection in a unique and memorable way.
The film’s tenor is quiet and ruminative, focused on the delicate, poetic space of intimacy and relationships. Shot in clear, luminous light and cinematography, the images capture details with a level of care and attention that feel both elegiac and distilled, as if the film itself was trying to engrave the lovely but fleeting moments of a time together in its memory before it disappears.
This delicate, minimal approach to visuals makes sense vis-a-vis the characters’ central dilemma, as Emma and Josh navigate her uncontrollable disappearances after an initially rhapsodic start. Josh is worried and anxious when she disappears, even filing a missing-persons report when she first vanishes. Those absences are unpredictable, both in when they happen and how long Emma is gone, and they affect the couple’s dynamic. Josh can’t count on Emma’s presence regularly; Emma doesn’t want to feel guilt over something that isn’t entirely in her control. Eventually, they break up and Josh tries to move on.
As Josh and Emma, respectively, actors Xavier Green and Allida Clark capture both the tenderness and deep affection of their characters’ bond, but also the erosion of trust and connection as Emma’s absences sometimes prove inconvenient and prolonged. Josh especially has the demeanor of a haunted man — haunted both by his enduring love for Emma and the hole in his life when she’s gone, both during and after the relationship.
What’s especially sympathetic in HOW TO DISAPPEAR is how deeply Josh tries to understand Emma’s vanishings. In a gentle but painful way, that journey forces him to learn more about himself and pay closer attention to his inner life. And in that sense, these disappearances become something almost metaphorical — how we deal with anxiety and avoidance when it comes to human attachment, how we navigate separateness and being together when we are intertwined with someone in life. As Josh gets close to the central mystery of Emma, it also becomes just how far we might go when it comes to understanding — and maybe even being with — the people we love.
