Cutting Loose: Laughably Bad Lies and Terribly Bad Friends

Sean Nam’s Cutting Loose features the ending of a bad friendship and the consternation it entails. The latter is such an overwhelming presence (and understandably so) for its protagonist that the film may have felt compelled to take its sci-fi angle seriously. 

The abovementioned sci-fi essentially boils down to the old My dad works for the FBI/CIA/whathaveyou comeback: Andrew (Maximilian Itsikson) says that his father’s company has invented time travel using his sixth-grade science experiment, and he has used it to travel back in time over five hundred times to stop Daniel (Kabir McNeely) from breaking up their friendship and subsequently ending up a nobody. 

Hm. 

The veracity is left rather ambiguous at the end of the day. What it does accomplish, however, is highlighting the nature of Daniel and Andrew’s friendship (and better reveals why Daniel wants to end the friendship than when the latter actually recounts his grievances). When told that ending the friendship and pursuing his life on his terms will ruin Daniel’s life forever, he, however fearfully, favours that possibility over maintaining his friendship with Andrew. The open, if one-note, vulnerability in McNeely’s performance makes his character immediately understandable. The scene lasts roughly five minutes, the longest in the film’s 13-minute runtime, and while it is difficult to take Andrew’s claims even remotely seriously, the apprehension that the film wants to elicit with its soundtrack meaningfully doubles as (or more accurately, works only in the direction of) the atmosphere of terror that Andrew clearly wants to keep Daniel trapped in. 

The scenes preceding and after this do not have the same substance with which to gloss over the lack of finesse in the production. Thus, they fail where it succeeds. Perhaps to rehash the earlier point, the sci-fi-esque soundtrack, with all its tension and heralding of doom, works only as the expression of Daniel’s fear. In this light, it is an astute choice that solidifies the unnaturalness and dread that he feels in asserting himself; confronting someone who is eager to manipulate and distort his sense of reality; and finally, leaving the comfort of familiarity that an old friendship, however awful, provides.  

Cutting Loose offers five-odd, illustrative minutes of what it means to have and leave behind a friend who is about as good for you as necrotic tissue. Many have known that experience, and so will recognise themselves in Daniel’s torment. What will remain of the film in memory, though, may be the laughable banality of Andrew’s malice. 

Watch Cutting Loose Short Film