Céline Roustan
A man receives numerous texts and calls from his sister, but is too busy obsessing over opening a pistachio to answer. From such a simple premise, writer/director Richard Paris Wilson crafts a surprisingly potent story in Open as the talented storyteller stretches the absurdity of this mundane fixation to its max, revealing a surprising emotional depth.
Wilson confesses that the story idea arrived to him while attempting to write a feature screenplay during lockdown. After a week of effort, and with nothing to show for it on the page, he realized that collected upon his desk was a pile of pistachios he had been unable to open. “Trying to prise them open became a kind of avoidance therapy”, he explained, adding that “as soon as this became a conscious habit the idea for the film came quite quickly.”
“Sometimes your silly ideas are better than your sophisticated ideas.”
It’s a relatable quirk, but is it really sufficient to serve as the foundation of a film? Yes and no. “Sometimes your silly ideas are better than your sophisticated ideas”, Wilson acknowledged to us, while conceding that, “the reason I had to make this film came later – that was the final 10%, which in itself took much longer to get right”. While the silliness of the premise is fun and allows viewers to project what they want onto the character’s descent into madness, it’s truly the reveal of the end that packs a punch and makes the film stand out.
The visual approach to this absurd setup is a key source of the film’s appeal, so, once the script was hammered out, the first collaborator to jump aboard was Libby Morris, who built the actual, 6-foot pistachio that Wilson parked in his house for months. This gigantic nut comes across on screen as the perfect juxtaposition between the superficial and deep layers of the film, representing the mental real estate the obsession is occupying within the character’s psyche, while also turning into a safe cocoon where Trevor the protagonist eventually hides, taking a womb-like quality.
Shot selection, cinematography, and editing work together to depict a descent into paranoid obsession.
These types of stories ask a lot of editors to be able to visually match the proceedings with the mindset of the character, and David Warren utilizes Joseph Guy’s cinematography in clever ways to mirror the protagonist’s headspace and attune the rhythm of the film to the character arc. And, that arc, does prove to be deeply touching, once the comedic elements have served their purpose. Indeed, its classic quest metaphor is quite powerful and evolves effectively throughout the film. Between distracting himself with this absurd mission, holding on to something, and retreating behind a shell, the film surprises by how compelling it can be from its simple concept.
After hitting the festival circuit, we are excited to host the online debut of Open. Wilson is currently working on several projects including his first feature Perfect Wall which is a surreal romance about a woman who falls in love with her living room wall, as well as a new short, which Wilson describes to us as an abstract horror about climate change, set in Iceland.