Rob Munday

Relationships are difficult! While this isn’t news to anyone, it’s worth remembering that being a partner requires effort, compromise, and sacrifice. However, if you feel your current relationship isn’t working and needs to come to an end, you need to think about the where and when of that break-up carefully. Unlike the boyfriend in today’s pick, Strandet (Stranded), who decides to break things off at the end of a backpacking holiday – unaware that a pandemic will trap them together in their suffocating hotel room indefinitely.

“I was personally stranded for a month on a pacific island with my ex”

Based on writer/director Peter Salling’s own pandemic experience of being “stranded for a month on a Pacific island with [his] ex,” Strandet (Stranded) tells the story of flawed but relatable characters in an intense situation – one that many may have found themselves in during the COVID19 outbreak. As we witness the pair struggling to come to terms with the end of their relationship in isolation, they aren’t always easy to like – he’s often distant and cold, while her character comes across a little too frail – but their journey is a raw, honest look at how messy and complicated uncoupling can be.

With Salling aiming to create his “most personal film to date,” he drew from those real-life experiences during pre-production, working with co-writer Morten Schmidt to develop the script through a process they called “emotional research.” Through interviews with both himself and his ex, they unpacked the feelings from their own “stranded” experience, bringing as much authenticity and immersion as possible to the story. Taking all the material they extracted from this method, it was then physically printed out and a story structure was pieced together, like blocks of Lego. “After finding a narrative thread we then went into a more traditional screenwriting process”, Salling reveals.

“Light and sound should both put extra pressure on the characters as well as help communicate their emotional state to the audience.” – Salling on their approach to production.

Unable to travel to a real hotel in Peru, where their narrative takes place, Strandet was instead shot in a studio, where Salling was eager to paint a picture of not only the sweltering room the pair find themselves, but the exotic world just outside their door. Though the camera remains confined to the hotel room with the unraveling couple, Salling uses lighting and sound to evoke the world outside. While the cinematography deepens the film’s sense of claustrophobia, the light and sound gesture toward a hopeful world beyond, symbolising the possibility of moving forward and finding a brighter future.

While Strandet is undeniably a pandemic short – a subgenre many of us may be sick of by now – we love a well-executed two-hander here at S/W and Salling’s film is a standout example of how a simple premise can come to life with the help of two outstanding performances and some flawless filmmaking. It may lack some of the originality we usually look for in a S/W pick, but it excels in so many other areas it felt impossible to ignore. With his new Sælhud (Cool Boy) complete and entering its festival run, the filmmaker also has his eyes on his debut feature, which is “early in the development phase”, so we’ll have to eagerly wait for further details.