SON OF SARA – a film by Houston Bone ⁓

Sara

“You’re so tight,” says Carol. “Are you trying to keep him inside of you or something? It’s like you’re dilating backwards.” Carol (Tymika Tafari) is talking to her partner Sara (Chloe Van Landschoot). They have known each other for a long time, but started dating after Sara’s boyfriend Troy Loomis (Garrett Hnatiuk) left without saying why. Shortly after that, Sara discovered she was pregnant.

Carol puts “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby” by Cigarettes After Sex on the record player. After watching a zombie movie together, they go to bed. In the middle of the night, Sara goes to the kitchen and devours a pound of raw ground beef with her bare hands.

Sara and Carol watch a zombie flick.

In the bathroom, she coughs up long black hair, possibly indicating a combination of trichotillomania and trichophagia, although the hair on her head seems undamaged. She picks part of a fingernail (or a tiny claw?) from the mass of hair in the sink, then flushes the whole thing. At 12:50 am, she calls Troy and gets his voicemail. Through the thin curtain covering the bathroom doorway, she sees a dark male figure with red eyes, and screams. When Carol gets there she sees no one.

The next day she literally bumps into Troy on the street and, after some dithering, accepts his invitation to dinner at his place. Carol doesn’t like the idea at all, but she is owner/operator of a local pub, and can’t come along because she is scheduled to tend bar. A news clipping pinned to Sara’s fridge and headed “Queer-owned Bar Opens” reads: “In an era when trendy and upscale bars seem to dominate the nightlife scene, Carol’s bar stands as a testament to authenticity and history. Nestled between modern high-rises and flashy neon signs, this establishment has held its ground for decades.”

Troy

Carol’s bar is decorated for Halloween and the moon is full. The last time a Harvest Moon happened was in 2020. (The next such event will be in 2039.) The film’s opening scene happened three weeks prior to the events just described, and would have coincided with the Harvest Moon.

Troy drives a 1970 Chevy c10 pickup. and owns a farm outside of town. (The address is 66 Clipsham Rd.) He lives there with his mother Agnes (Jane Moffat) in a house built in 1836 by his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. Troy tells Carol that the first seances in Canadian history took place there.

This might point to where the film is set. Susanna Moodie, who lived in Eastern Ontario, first wrote about spiritualism in the 1830s. (See “A Glorious Madness: Susanna Moodie and the Spiritualist Movement”.)

Jane Moffat as Troy’s mother Agnes, who never married. Sara’s surprised reaction when she first meets Troy’s mother makes one wonder if she recognizes her. When Agnes leaves the room, Sara turns to Troy and says: ‘Your mom’s hot.’

Everyone in this film (excepting the pregnant Sara) smokes, including the cabdriver (Tony White). There is a possibly significant sequence where Carol lights up at work, and the scene cuts in rapid succession first to Agnes smoking and then to Troy doing likewise. Near the start of things we see Carol in a thoughtful pose holding something hand-rolled.

Sara demonstrates only one food craving, that being raw hamburger. But she consumes that and any other food available to her ravenously. At dinner with Troy and Agnes, she eats everything so rapidly she must wash the food down with raw milk (which has been banned in Canada since 1991). It is true that Mia Farrow’s character ate raw meat in Rosemary’s Baby, but Sara’s devouring of raw hamburger (and milk) is more akin to the way Liz devoured the chocolate cake in Osgood Perkins’ film Keeper. Sara does have chocolate cake after dinner.

Carol in pensive pose.

Van Landschoot talked about Sara with Peter Gray of The AU Review. “Sara spends a lot of the film letting things kind of happen to her,” Van Landschoot explained. “She’s quite avoidant. She’s not letting [her girlfriend] in on the meat of it all, or the heart of it all. She’s very internal with everything because, yeah, that’s what we do when we’re scared. That’s certainly what she does when she’s scared. I don’t think she wanted to worry her partner, and I think she wanted to feel like she could take care of herself. But eventually all of that starts to dissolve, and you have no choice but to let someone into the trauma of it all.”

Tony the taxi driver works for Carruthers Taxi Service. This could be a reference to Ellen Regan’s character Suzanne Caruthers in ‘The Great Line’ – episode 106 of TAXI

Houston Bone told Adam Nayman of The Toronto Star: “I wanted to explore politeness. Every great horror movie has a moment when the audience sees a character doing something that they think they’d never do themselves. But the things we have an aversion to are also things that we might actually do. It’s hard to say no to somebody’s face. We are always smarter and stronger in our own fantasies…When I wrote the script, I was in a new relationship. I also had an ex who’d sort of disappeared, and that was my way into the story. I was like, ‘Oh my god, what if this person showed up again?’ My fear is that I’d be too curious.”