Diane Knight

War Brides is a Canadian television film that centres on four women, three from the United Kingdom and one from Germany, who come to Canada as war brides of Canadian soldiers after the end of World War II.

Cast creates a claustrophobic and haunting space where people and things invade worlds in which they do not normally belong. Lifeless dolls are heaped inside drawers, dolled-up life size figures lie motionless on a windy beach at the water’s edge; a chair rocks in an empty room, a mirror reflects and observes, and a chest of drawers is caressed by the sea. The film has a dramatic sensibility that sets up a false promise of narrative. Its structure, instead, is akin to that of dreams where different scenic spaces collapse and the inanimate and animate interchange. Wide-angled perspectives, shifting points of view and juxtapositions of sound and silence force inner and outer realities to collide, creating an unsettling psychic world.

A vengeful ex-con goes on a 24 hour killing spree, never saying a word. The discredited detective investigating the case is convinced there is more to it than the evidence suggests.