Trinity

Brattle Theater
March 22, 2017

http://www.brattlefilm.org/2017/03/26/trinity/


Director: Skip Shea

Screenwriter: Skip Shea

Cast: Sean Carmichael, David Graziano, Aurora Grabill, Lynn Lowry

2016 | USA/Italy | DCP | 85 min.

A man accidentally bumps into the priest who abused him when he was a child, sending him on a twisted journey through his past.

In his first feature, Massachusetts’ own Skip Shea plumbs the depths of loss, trauma, and guilt through the story of Michael, a stoic artist (Sean Carmichael) who stops for coffee only to encounter the priest (David Graziano) who once sexually abused him. What would you do if you came face-to-face with the man who ruined your life?

Trinity explores that moment as a dreamlike journey through time past, a route that carries the troubled Michael in and out of churches, a dimly lit bathroom stall, and the tables of tarot card readers. We meet Father Tom’s other victims, most memorably the haunting Angel (Aurora Grabill), and a cadre of Michael’s chatty adulthood friends who seem to discuss the tenets of Catholicism as others casually discuss their theories about Westworld. Their removed, academic dissections rarely consider that the scars of abuse do not always fade with time. The experiences continue to strangle and suffocate the victims long after they’ve left the physical proximity of their tormentors.

An outspoken survivor of clergy abuse, Shea understands real terror is not necessarily found in cannibalistic reveries, but in the unexpected and most-unwelcome greeting from one’s tormenter in a benignly cozy coffee shop. These are the film’s most profoundly squeamish moments and they will stay with you long after you leave the theater. Filmed mostly in Western Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the non-linear narrative borrows from Mulholland Drive and the works of Alain Resnais, but this searingly painful story is all Shea. The journey is at times arduous and altogether frustrating, but you will never lose sight of the hope cautiously peering out from the rabbit hole.