Skin & Bone

After giving Other Side of the Box a try, I decided to explore more short films — and seeing Amanda Seyfried on the cover of Skin & Bone was all the reason I needed. Be aware — spoilers below!

It’s a 17-minute short film that hit me immediately with a sense of discomfort — because there’s something inherently threatening about a woman alone with a strange man, far from civilisation. Even civilisation doesn’t offer that much protection, to be honest. I felt anxious and suspicious of him from the start. On top of that, his visions gave the impression that he’d done something terrible in the past and was running from it — or from the consequences. The unease around Serene’s safety just kept building.

As Christian’s (Thomas Sadoski) visions continue, the man trapped in a horse’s body asks him to be killed. Christian manages to kill one of the animals but can’t bring himself to do it to the horse — until Serene stops and calms him. In the next scene, we see a goat with one white eye, just like Christian’s.

The song Serene sings before the final events gives us the backstory and the key to what’s really going on — a woman in her family was sexually abused, bled to death, and cursed the men before she died. Serene carries on this legacy by turning men into animals:

How will I remember, I was just a girl Pull my mother out the kitchen door How she struggled when they kissed her How the rain began to pour Lay and bleed and how she cried out “Be you curse forevermore” Grass grow knee-high on your lonesome grave How I pray for hours, oh, Lord, your soul to save But there ain’t no Lord in heaven Only men and beasts below So I swore to you a promise Be they curse before I go This apparently happened to all the men, while the women stayed on and kept the farm going — confirmed by the small cemetery Christian finds where only women are buried.

A lot of people point out the resemblance to Circe, but one particular scene stood out to me. Near the middle of the film, Serene invites Christian to talk. He tells her he’s separated from his wife, and then says:

— Started hating her, little by little, so I left. Lay awake at night, listening to her breathing. Caught myself wishing her breathing would stop, so that it would just be quiet and I’d be alone. And that scared me, so…

What a strange thing to say to a woman living alone in a remote place. But it’s also completely realistic — because men often don’t understand how threatening such things sound. We live in the same society but in very different realities, and men’s experience of the world is significantly safer than women’s. (Yes, some would push back and say men face more danger — but the difference is that both men and women are primarily threatened by men.) I think this was Serene’s way of confirming he was the “right” man for this. She found her answer.

Because she has supernatural powers, she isn’t afraid of him. And what follows is a quietly devastating exchange:

— Man, that’s a weird place. It’s only women up there. There’s no men. — That’s my family. That’s not for you. — I found it by accident. I didn’t mean to. — You didn’t mean to? You don’t take responsibility for much, do you? — I take responsibility for what I need to. — That’s why you like to be alone, isn’t it? Because you’re weak.

It’s interesting how men are bothered by the idea that women can live without them — irritated, even, because it’s something they can’t say the same about. And his answer about responsibility is telling: he takes it only for what he decides is necessary, and if he doesn’t think something is his responsibility, he simply won’t.

As the Bible says: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” (Matthew 22:21) — so render men’s violence back into the beasts they are.