Your Reality - Short Film Review

Your Reality is a short film wrote and produced by Tajana Anders and directed by Top Tarasin. The short film is based on tow young adults Alysha (Tajana Anders) and Mark (Tyler James) who coincidentally meet at a coffee house and get in a very fast-moving and one-sided abusive relationship. Tajana stated that she created the film to raise awareness around the issue of gaslighting and the significant effect it can have on someone. Tajana stated in her website that gaslighting “is an elaborate and insidious technique of psychological manipulation. Its effect is to gradually undermine the victim’s confidence in his own ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, right from wrong, or reality from appearance, thereby rendering him pathologically dependent on the gaslighter in his thinking or feelings.” Different ways of gaslighting include countering, withholding, forgetting, trivializing and diverting, most of which are very clear traits the Mark hold but due to the storyline, we do not see the extent of this until the very end of the film where we see Mark now psychically abusing Alysha and that she has been blind to his ways throughout their relationship. 

Fig 1. Mark leaning over Alysha after having hit her.

From the figure above Mark is towering over Alysha and says “Now look what you’ve done” stating that this is all her fault and that she could never handle his “honesty”, a clear sign of trivializing; making her feelings seem unimportant.

If we focus on Alysha’s character, her journey embodies the story arc, we see her as a strong and independent women who works at at a successful marketing agency, but she shows signs straight away of being forgetful which links to how she is so effected by Mark. She then meets Mark, which is the inciting incident, this happens very early on in the film as he is introduced in the first minute. She’s also shown to be very close to her friend Sophie who she also loses touch with throughout the film because of how indulged she is in her life. Her friend describes her as “the least selfish person I know”, which once again highlights that Alysha would do anything to keep Mark happy. Around three minutes into the film we are now in Act 2 with the tension building, Alysha knocks at a door and Mark appears he compliments her but the states “I was going to complain about you being late, but I think with you looking this good I think I can forgive you”. 

Fig. 2 At Mark’s house, with the couple on their first date.

Mark says that he made the food for seven thirty and it is now cold because she is “late”, even though it is a simple misunderstanding but Alysha still apologises. Alysha, looking around his house, compliments his work and says he’s very talented which he arrogantly replies “so people seem to say”. From here there relationship moves very quickly, they suddenly moves in together and over time we see Alysha become depressed and increasingly insecure until one night she gets home and talks to Mark, she tells him she lost her job but he just tells her to go to bed and they’ll talk about it later, this is the crisis of the story as Alysha has now hit rock bottom, she is stuck in an abusive relationship and unaware of it, plus her now having lost her job loads to her being medicated in order to ‘help her’. 

Fig 3. We find out that Alysha is now medicated. She is being comforted by Mark but he is not helping her.

However, things are not what they seem. One clear sign of gaslighting is someone’s reality being morphed and they no longer know what’s normal in their relationship and what’s not. For example, in Act 3, the so called ‘resolution phase’ we finally see that Mark has been really emotionally abusing her saying he’s not surprised she got fired, calling her useless, pathetic and an alcoholic, really undermining her. This whole time the real truth of the way Mark has been treating Alysha has been hidden through her perception of the truth which links to the effect of gaslighting as stated earlier. In any future work that I will make in the future, I will definitely consider using this kind of story telling for short films. I think the hidden meaning behind all of Mark's actions and all of the information that we, as an audience, are you to be told, really makes the film deserve all the praise it has got. When dealing with mental health issues, I believe it's really important to portray everything correctly and appropriately, which Tajana had done very well with. I really enjoyed watching and writing about this film and it will definitely influence my future work.

References:

Tajana Anders. (2020). Your Reality. Online. Tajana Anders.

[Accessed on 29/10/2021]

Tajana Anders. (2019) Psychological Film on Gaslighting. Online. Indiegogo.

[Accessed on 29/10/2021]

Rachel Nall. (2020). What are the long-term affects of gaslighting. Online. Medical News Today.

[Accessed on 20/10/2021]