9/28/21, 5:38 PM Facing it | Psyche Films

Navigating a pub, Shaun’s anxieties are (quite

literally) plastered on his face
8 minutes

You     who I don’t know     I don’t know how to talk to you

—What is it like for you there?

– from ‘Sanctuary’ by Jean Valentine, in Door in the

Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 (2004)

The opening lines of Valentine’s poem capture the disquiet terrain of

the world as seen from the inside out, through the lens of an anxious
psyche. Likewise, in Facing It, a young man of perhaps college age
named Shaun grapples with the feeling of being trapped in the cage of
his own mind, helpless to escape it. The viewer is given access to
Shaun’s eyes and ears. His sensory perspective is dreamlike:
imaginative, yet brushing up against a recognisable reality. But, as you
might expect, it’s not a pleasant dream – his world is populated by
characters with strange clay faces that sit atop human bodies, and
their muffled voices echo incomprehensibly. As if submerged
underwater, Shaun is out of his depth.

Following the trajectory of Shaun’s thoughts, the film floats back in

time between the past and the present – the two indelibly
interconnected. In the present, Shaun’s face is a vision of blue
melancholy, melting and dripping as he makes panicked attempts to
converse at a pub. We see these emotions at play, personified in the
form of limbs that appear out of nowhere, stifling his efforts to
socialise. Hands push and pull at his face, pluck out his eyes and cover
his mouth mid-conversation; a foot kicks a glass out of his hand.
Flashbacks reveal the ways in which he has become the embodiment
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9/28/21, 5:38 PM Facing it | Psyche Films

of his past relationships; in particular, the troubled one with his

parents.

To make Shaun’s raw emotions vivid and visceral, the UK filmmaker

Sam Gainsborough deploys a mixed-media technique. Combining
claymation, pixelation and live-action – a laborious and artful process
– Gainsborough blends analogue and digital media. Through
handmade indentations and growths on the clay faces, he inverts
Shaun’s inner stress response, rendering it ever-present and tactile.
And by integrating live-action human bodies and settings, he grounds
Shaun’s experience in intertwined physical and emotional spaces,
building an uneasy mood some viewers might find all too relatable.

By providing a window into Shaun’s internal world, Gainsborough

highlights how our emotions and experiences are more complicated
than even we can see, and tethered to our past, present and imagined
future. The film reminds us that we can’t decode internal states by
watching outward behaviours, since our exteriors are only the tip of a
vast iceberg. As the speaker in Valentine’s poem ponders, even if we
‘imagine other solitudes’ and ‘listen for what it is like there’, it’s
impossible to know what it is to be anyone else but us – even if, as
Facing It seems to argue, it’s still worth trying.

Written by Olivia Hains

Director: Sam Gainsborough

Producer: Jimmy Campbell Smith

15 SEPTEMBER 2021

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