Tag Archives: Cory Choy

Poetry of Nightmares

Aisha

by Hope Madden

An instinct for sound design, a grasp of the difference between telling a story and reading a story – this is the power of Aisha. The piece of short fiction performance leaves you with the impression of your own heart racing, a sense of place and sound, of scent and feeling.

Co-creators Cory Choy and Feyiṣayo Aluko deliver a brief but complete story. We live Aisha’s nightmare with her, hear what she hears, feel what she feels – the breath on her neck, the shrinking claustrophobia of a tunnel, the stench of the bodies, the nightmare of the woman in the blue hijab. As evocative and true as any nightmare while it happens, the story brims with imagery and metaphor without succumbing to either.

In telling the story the way they do, the authors ask you to become Aisha, a powerful way to pull listeners into an unknown world and make them feel part of it. Frightening without being truly horror, the poetry in the storytelling echoes a primal terror of loss of self while imagery places that terror within the misery of war. And yet, tantalizingly, it’s Aisha’s waking moments at the tail end of the story that feel most genuinely frightening.

The Tribeca winner for Best Independent Audio Fiction promises a fascinating character to follow on a longer journey.

Listen to Aisha now at tribecafilm.com.

Can’t Go Home Again

Esme, My Love

by Hope Madden

We don’t know much about Esme (Audrey Grace Marshall) or Hannah (Stacey Weckstein), really.

Director/co-writer Cory Choy’s feature debut Esme, My Love keeps us in the dark about a lot of things. Choy leaves us to piece together what we can of the duo’s mysterious trip into the woods, just as Hannah leaves Esme to do.

More brooding mystery thriller than outright horror, Choy’s film plays on your imagination with gorgeous sound design and cinematography. An eerie mismatch of voiceover and image in the early going suggests that not everything with Hannah is A-OK.

Ostensibly, she’s taking her daughter to visit the old, abandoned family stomping grounds so the two can spend some time together. Esme, Hannah suggests, is sick. She doesn’t seem sick. She seems fine. Hannah, on the other hand…

The atmosphere Choy develops creates a hypnotic world perfectly suited to Hannah’s psychological unbending. Thanks to two malleable performances, that meticulously crafted atmosphere pays off.

Choy and co-writer Laura Allen refuse to spoon-feed you information. Their structure is loose, their explanations all but nonexistent. You’re left to parse through the images and sensations, determine what’s real and what isn’t, and decide things for yourself.

The ambiguity often works in the film’s favor. Esme, My Love possesses a brooding, nightmarish quality that, along with the two performances, keeps you guessing and interested. But to be honest, a touch more structure would have strengthened the film, which begins to feel lovely but unmoored before it’s over.

At a full 1:45, the film’s fluid storytelling and disjointed imagery flirt with self-indulgence.

Esme, My Love never offers any solid catharsis, any true clarity. Yes, you can guess the meaning of the climax, but with so much guesswork throughout, it feels less like ambiguity and more like a cheat. Or worse still, indecisiveness.

While frustrating, it’s not enough to sink a film that submerges you in a dark family tragedy and leaves you stranded.