Cast: Brittany S. Hall, Will Brill, Gail Bean
The love story that dominates the first 15 minutes of Shatara Michelle Ford’s tight and stunning feature-length directorial debut is seductive. Renesha (Brittany S. Hall) meets Evan (Will Brill) at a bar. When they run into one another at a grocery store sometime later, a romance starts to unfold. But Test Pattern is not about love. It’s about bodily autonomy and what happens when a Black woman’s is ripped from her, first by a predator and then by someone she loves. One night, well into her and Evan’s relationship, Renesha goes out with a friend. They are targeted by two men and encouraged to drink and take weed gummies. Renesha ends up in a strange bed with no idea how she got there. In the aftermath, Evan drivers her to get a rape kit, a gesture that slowly becomes more and more oppressive as they realize how difficult it is to obtain one in Texas. Evan’s insistence starts out with concern for Renesha’s well-being, but turns into a violation—a white man having little regard for what his Black girlfriend is actually experiencing. Ford’s use of music to shape tension is astounding, as is the way she films Renesha’s trauma. Test Pattern is a tense, upsetting film, that is nonetheless utterly striking.
The film premiered at the BlackStar Film Festival in 2019 and was released in 2021 by Kino Lorber.
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