We like to believe that all things broken can be repaired.
They can't.
We like to believe that love, or at least the desire to love, heals everything.
It doesn't.
IRMA, a 13-minute short film written and directed by Roger Torres that has already been named a semi-finalist in the Student Academy Awards Narrative category, is a devastating short. It's a film that communicates more in its under 13-minute running time than a good amount of narrative features I've seen this year.
IRMA stars Maria Jimena Gastelum as Melissa, whose backstory we don't really know other than she's living alone in her new home with her daughter, Lydia (Jazmene Valenzuela), when her mother, Irma (Christina Mauro), unexpectedly appears and tries to break into her home.
It is in that moment that we quickly realize all is not well.
Set to screen as part of the Dissolving Dreams shorts package at the Virginia Film Festival later this month, IRMA is an appropriately layered and complex film with Torres's emotionally raw dialogue saying as much in the film's silences as it does when words are spoken. The story itself is beautifully framed yet seems to intentionally demand that we wonder and allow our imaginations to fill in the blanks. It is seemingly obvious what is unfolding, however, we're not so much privy to the details as we are their aftermath.
Gastelum is both broken and ferocious as Melissa, a wounded warrior whose every flinch feels like an internalized jump scare and yet whose protectiveness of Lydia draws us in and never lets us go. Somehow, it's both a raw yet understated performance that leaves us constantly wondering where this all can possibly end.
I have followed Christina Mauro's career for years all the way back to 2006's Little Big Top. I'm not sure I was prepared for what Mauro does here, radiating a wide array of emotions and giving us a woman who at first seems to demand our hatred yet whose humanity is more complex and more nuanced. This Irma seems to have perpetuated a cycle that Melissa is determined to somehow stop, however, amidst it all we never forget that Irma is, perhaps, irrevocably broken.
But then again, maybe not.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention young Jazmene Valenzuela, the emotional core of IRMA and a young actress whose work here deserves to have Hollywood knocking on her door. She's raw and vulnerable with an intuition that mesmerizes and a soulful intelligences that reminds us of the price we pay when cycles aren't broken.
In the end, Melissa must decide if protecting herself and her daughter is worth the price of abandoning her mother forever.
It's a devastating decision, of course, yet for many of us watching it's a no doubt familiar one. Everything that Torres does here works from the slight, intentional dialogue filled with meaningful silences and devastating pauses to the take your breath away moments of suspense and suffocating anxiety. Lensing by Onyinyechi Ogomaka leaves us constantly off-balance and never quite sure of how a scene is going to play out. The original music by Kyle Simpson amplifies the film's dueling intimacies and dark unknowns. Production design by Isabela Campillo leaves us constantly torn between safety and the awareness that there's always a risk in the dark.
IRMA is, in the end, a wisely brought to life story with no easy answers and wounds that may or may not heal. Cycles are cycles and, yes, sometimes the wounds never heal and we're left to decide over and over and over again what we're going to do next simply to survive.
IRMA is a devastating effort, however, it's devastating in a way that honors the complex journey of abusive cycles, rich humanities, and the complex layers of healing. A film you won't soon forget, IRMA is a film to watch for if it shows at a festival near you.
Written by Richard Propes
The Independent Critic
