TO BE SAVED | Omeleto Drama
1,238
Published 2024-07-08
TO BE SAVED is used with permission from Jeff Locker. Learn more at imdb.com/title/tt6859196.
Derek has returned to his home after recovering from the attempt he made to end his life while suffering from deep depression. His brother Vinny is there to meet him after Derek is dropped off, bringing him groceries and trying to help him settle back in.
The homecoming is deeply uncomfortable, considering the circumstances. And though Derek has a hard time hearing it, the two brothers are forced to have a brutally honest and gut-wrenching conversation about the devastating effects of depression on both brothers' lives.
Directed by Brent Harvey from a script written by Jeff Locker, who also co-stars as Derek, this sensitive, deeply compassionate drama examines the effects that a mental illness can have not just on one person, but an entire family ecosystem. While it doesn't minimize Derek's immediate, visceral experience of his crippling depression, it also gives voice to the helplessness, anger and profound sadness that loved ones experience as they watch the person they love grapple with their suffering and sometimes harm or immolate themselves as a result.
Brought to life by naturalistic and intimate visuals, the foundation of the film is the excellent writing and storytelling, which takes the two-hander set-up of a conversation between two characters in a single location and maximizes its inherent intimacy to an uncomfortable, confrontational degree. While the initial atmosphere is awkward and stilted between the brothers at first, both have a lot to say to one another -- and it all comes pouring forth in a torrent of suppressed thoughts and feelings coming to the surface.
As an actor, Locker plays Derek not just how the weight of a deep depression can pull a person down, and how the desperate management of it, pharmaceutically and otherwise, can take a toll on someone. As Vinny, actor Pete Capella's performance nails how family members often dance around the feelings of their struggling loved ones, scared to exacerbate the situation. But those relationships also begin to strain as well, as Capella nails the difficulty of such a balancing act and the devastation that watching someone they love go through such difficulties has on them. While Derek has likely already hit his breaking point, Vinny is hitting his, and their relationship hangs in the balance.
TO BE SAVED has an unvarnished intimacy, but there's an undeniable love between the brothers that makes their pain particularly sharp and poignant. But that brotherly relationship also lets the characters dig deep, giving voice to their most roiling feelings in a way that only families can. The film ends unresolved -- there is no tidy bow on the narrative that comforts both viewers and characters and no sense of a solution to the emotional quagmire both characters are in. But there is an opening of truth and honesty, finally: a hearing for things that needed to be said, and hopefully to be understood at last.
All Comments (7)
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Excellent production! Everything is top notch 👌
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It doesn't make sense, but the pain never leaves you
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Tough subject. Very real, very raw. Great performances.
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Good one.
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I don't know, I was angry at his ingratitude, Then the blame game. I remember years ago when I was doing my internship in ICU, one of the male nurses was speaking to a suicide attempt and he asked. " Do you see yourself as a failure? The patient replied in the affirmative, to which the nurse responded with '"You're right you are, here, let me show you how to cut your wrists so that you succeed in doing what you tried to do." There is a lot more to my story but..............
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💔
