Come Back

The film explores the deeply disturbing space of domestic abuse, but more specifically, the absolute and crushing difficulty of escaping that space. The said exploration remains crisp and swift, as well as impactful in the force with which it shares its ideas.

The viewer is presented with a woman, the protagonist, who is bruised and hurt in an appalling manner. While she takes care of her injuries, her young son, completely unaware of her mother’s plight, watches playfully violent antics of cartoon characters on the television in the next room.

The film employs the innocent, childish images from the cartoon as a juxtaposition against the brutal reality of the physical assault of the protagonist, to drive its message home. Frenzied texts from her husband continue, “Can we just talk?”, “It won’t happen again.”, and the viewer already knows the implicit responses to them - the direction this talk will eventually take won't be very different from the current scenario, and that it will indeed happen again. In the process, an urgent message is also offered, but without making the narrative didactic, overly-sentimental or superficial.