Manipulate: These Things Aren’t Mine
★★★★☆ Intense
Manipulate @ Traverse: Thurs 13 Feb 2025
Review by Rebecca Mahar
Publicly screened only once before, at Bristol Circus City, Manipulate Festival marks the Scottish debut of These Things Aren’t Mine.
From film-maker Barney White and gymnast turned circus artist and movement director Gabbie Cook, this film is based in part on Cook’s lived experiences. It examines the lasting impact that high-pressure and often abusive elite childhood training environments can have those who endure them.
Screenshot from These Things Aren’t Mine. Pic: Barney White
Throughout, we follow Gabbie’s daily life teaching gymnastics in Spain, her interactions with friends and coworkers, and her struggle to maintain normalcy while battling her inner conflict and unseen injuries.
Opening with a morning sequence full of yesterday’s cold coffee, a dirty, fingerprinted microwave, and only the clean-swept impression of a set of keys on an otherwise dust-covered entry table, These Things Aren’t Mine immediately establishes as sense of unease and wrongness.
There is very little dialogue in this film, a deliberate choice by collaborators White and Cook, explained by White as an attempt to “communicate the visceral situation of what it’s like to live with that feeling”.
reconciliation
Music and aural design communicate what words do not —or cannot— and work with the many cuts within scenes to help illustrate Gabbie’s state of mind, as the visuals jump from day to night, in circles around her home where objects disappear and reappear, and between her public self and a private self, trapped in the forest of her own mind, struggling towards reconciliation.
Screenshot from These Things Aren’t Mine. Pic: Barney White
While there are some sequences that carry on longer than feels necessary (perhaps a result of the semi-improvisational fifteen-minute takes White utilised at certain points during filming), as a whole the storytelling of the film is exceptional.
Cook’s performance is both raw and nuanced, at its best in transitional moments, when she turns away from her internal turmoil to engage with friends, or vice-versa, when her inner pain slips through and shows on her face when others aren’t looking, allowing only the camera a glimpse into the burden of a double existence.
emotionally intense
Beautifully shot and lit, These Things Aren’t Mine is as artistically expressive as it is emotionally intense. It succeeds in Cook’s goal to “turn something traumatic into something creative”; following her personal story, while creating space for others to find themselves and their experiences in it.
The film ends hopefully; not promising that everything’s all better now, but recognising that progress has been made, that abuse is being held to account, and that the two Gabbies can at last begin to come together to heal.
Running time: One hour and 20 minutes (no interval), followed by 40 min Q&A
Traverse Theatre, 10 Cambridge Street, EH1 2ED.
Thurs 13 February 2025
One showing: 6pm
Run ended: Details here
Screenshot from These Things Aren’t Mine. Pic: Barney White
ENDS
