While Sara Driver's first film, You Are Not I, owes much of its mystery and novelty to Peter Bowles' 1948 short story, the way it's framed as an unsettling ghost story is all Driver. Suzanne Fletcher (who would be Driver's protagonist again in Sleepwalk) is an escaped mental patient using the confusion of a road accident to get back home to her sister, but it takes a while before that's understood. Rather, the first act plays like she's an unnoticeable spirit sending the dead off to the afterlife. Even once we've contextualized what's really happening, the portrait of mental illness, with delusions building on delusions until she reaches a dissociative state still works as a ghost story, perhaps one more akin to possession. Made with relatively little means and many non-actors, You Are Not I nevertheless resonates and prefigures the odd, eerie (and all too few) films to come in Sara Driver's filmography.
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While Sara Driver's first film, You Are Not I, owes much of its mystery and novelty to Peter Bowles' 1948 short story, the way it's framed as an unsettling ghost story is all Driver. Suzanne Fletcher (who would be Driver's protagonist again in Sleepwalk) is an escaped mental patient using the confusion of a road accident to get back home to her sister, but it takes a while before that's understood. Rather, the first act plays like she's an unnoticeable spirit sending the dead off to the afterlife. Even once we've contextualized what's really happening, the portrait of mental illness, with delusions building on delusions until she reaches a dissociative state still works as a ghost story, perhaps one more akin to possession. Made with relatively little means and many non-actors, You Are Not I nevertheless resonates and prefigures the odd, eerie (and all too few) films to come in Sara Driver's filmography.