Little Jar

by Christie Robb

Cast your mind back to the lockdown phase of the COVID pandemic. Spring of 2020. When office folks were sent home to hastily assemble a workspace in some relatively unused area of the house. When you figured you might as well open a bottle of wine at two in the afternoon on a Wednesday. When you weren’t entirely sure if you were living in the apocalypse or not.

If you were an introvert, like Ainsley the main character of the movie Little Jar, you may have initially been pleased, especially if you, like her, lived alone. At first, Ainsley is elated to escape her boundary averse co-workers and even rebuffs the offer of a weekly Facetime hang with her brother. She wants to do this two week quarantine thing entirely on her own. Then, the internet goes down, she drops her phone in the bathtub, and the silence thickens.

She’s on her own. In the woods.

What could go wrong?

As the pandemic drags out into months, Ainsley gets creative in her attempts to find companionship and has to confront that sometimes basking in a little well-earned solitude can mutate over time into society forgetting you ever existed and your  being left for dead.

First time feature director Dominic Lopez, in collaboration with his co-writer and star Kelsey Gunn, create a dramatic and whimsical story that is completely absurd yet totally relatable. Primarily shot in one location with one actor and a taxidermy mouse in a beret as the leads, Little Jar really illustrates what independent filmmakers can accomplish with a limited budget (and that we’ve all probably still got a lot of pandemic stuff to deal with).