The Severing trailer: Mark Pellington’s dark dance movie is heading to Slamdance

Prolific music video, television, and film director Mark Pellington, whose credits include Arlington Road and The Mothman Prophecies, has made a new feature film that will be having its world premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival. Described as a “dark dance movie”, Pellington’s latest is called The Severing, and you can check out the trailer in the embed above.

Pellington says The Severing is like “Pina meets Saw“… but if you’re like me, you’ll need to be reminded what Pina is. It’s a 2011 Wim Wenders film that served as “a tribute to the late German choreographer, Pina Bausch, as her dancers perform her most famous creations.”

Pellington provided the following statement about The Severing:

A feature length (70 minutes) dance film, a cathartic movement piece that I created in collaboration with the brilliant choreographer NINA McNEELY (Gaspar Noe’s CLIMAX) and rising Dutch cinematographer ANN aEVELIN LAWFORD. Inspired by the Wim Wenders film PINA , I was interested in expressing feelings and emotions through a ‘story of movement and text’, rather than plot, capturing emotion and physicality on an experiential, non-linear visceral level. There is a story in this film, but it is abstract, and found in the movements of bodies and souls.

I’d been making independent films in Hollywood for 20 years and what’s clear to me is that traditional narrative film was not right vessel to share ‘the story’ of loss I had experienced and needed to express. Not every form or methodology can properly illustrate the hues of a particular emotional tone. I was unable to make a certain “kind” of plot driven narrative film that could effectively express specific feelings- dark, internal, physical, oblique- that I experienced about grief and loss. I searched for the right vehicle of expression, and then I met Nina McNeely.

I came to realize that grief lays in the body, grief lies in the physical, it lies in the DNA… Making dance the best non-verbal vessel to communicate this “story” of feeling leaden, overwhelmed, invisible. It’s the way to express what it feels like to be severed or to feel nothing. The film is a cathartic reencounter for anybody who’s felt loss, or isolation, or struggled with these theme: fear, reconnection, isolation.

The difficulty of union is the underpinning of this work. And, the struggle to recover that primal need for touch and reconnection. As if you could push a baby back into a woman after it’s born, it’s impossible, because we are pushed out into this place we call Earth. And the comfort, that warm safety-net, is taken from us, and that’s sometimes what grief feels like, being pushed out in the world alone.

Through the efforts, beauty, and interpretation of Nina and these wonderful bodies, these wonderful dancers and souls brought my idea to life. I was able to learn, I was able to see myself in this flesh, standing alone, separated from the floor, balanced, climbing, holding. After the convulsions of grief, after the submersion of darkness, it was an opportunity to see myself and thus, help others, allow others, to see themselves in bodies that are eternal, and not from a place in time, but from a universal place of knowing and experiencing.

The Severing seems like it’s an interesting experiment, and certainly does look very dark. Hopefully it won’t be long before viewers will have the chance to watch it outside of the festival world.