From Omeleto.
A woman copes with loss.
THE COCKROACH is used with permission from Mary Pat Bentel. Learn more at https://thecockroachfilm.com.
Emily was in a life-altering accident, losing her limb. In the aftermath, she’s been angry, depressed and resentful, and only the presence of her daughter keeps her going. But the days are a struggle as she copes with not just the physical realities of losing a limb, but the mental and emotional ones as well.
But slowly, Emily inches her way forward, learning to accept her new reality — and even find something to celebrate about her physical self.
Directed and written by Mary Pat Bentel, this powerful, moving short drama explores resilience, identity and vulnerability, as one woman rebuilds her body and sense of self after a life-altering accident. In the aftermath of such a course-altering event, the narrative digs into the often painful, uncomfortable moments, eschewing melodrama and pity in favor of psychological intimacy, nuance and empathy. Like its main character, it blends both toughness and tenderness, as we are immersed in Emily’s struggles and wins.
The storytelling — rendered in luminously naturalistic cinematography and intimate, unvarnished camerawork — manages the trick of being both rigorously honest about a body’s changes and quietly celebratory in the resilience and strength it takes to master or overcome them. The writing’s gift is its attention to seemingly quotidian detail; it is matter-of-fact and unsentimental about Emily’s obstacles in daily life, where actions she once took for granted become difficult and formidable due to the loss of her limb. But because of the storytelling’s toughness of purpose, what could have easily been a bleak, despair-ridden story becomes a portrait of messy, complicated survival that’s sometimes painful but always unvarnished in its honesty.
As Emily, actor Melissa Johns’s portrayal captures the emotional and physical disorientation of trauma and recovery. At times, she’s stuck, angry and resentful at what’s happened; at other times, she exhibits a dry, flippant sense of humor. Throughout it all, Johns plays Emily with a rawness, honesty and vulnerability that feels real and lived-in. She essentially circles through the stages of grief, missing the person she was. But as she inches towards acceptance, she begins to truly understand what she is capable of: beauty, joy and the pleasures of being alive.
Deeply humane, remarkably honest and compelling throughout, THE COCKROACH — which, as a multiple award winner on the festival circuit, is qualified to compete for the Best Live Action Short at this year’s Academy Awards — draws on the writer-director’s own history, in which a serious accident profoundly changed her body. With such authenticity at its core, the film generates an electric charge of emotion that comes not from indulging in sentimentality but from refusing to be anything but honest about the experience.
It celebrates the human spirit, not because our heroine always triumphs, but because she picks herself up and goes on, despite her own moments of frustration, awkwardness and grief. It frames healing as not a process with an endgame, but something that’s always happening, that demands presence and commitment, that’s not always pretty or easy. It finds and celebrates the resilience required to confront the hard and difficult in life. No matter how broken we are, there is strength, dignity and wholeness in picking up the fragments and putting them together again.
