“Jane’s Not Here” had me wiping away tears in the first fifteen minutes. My mind and heart were not prepared for the psychological and emotional toll of the film.
The film’s Midwest premiere at the Twin Cities Film Fest Oct. 21 saw enough success to warrant a second showing, a nod to its genius storytelling.
“Jane’s Not Here” follows Jane Hayes (Amelia Barr), who wakes up from a three-month coma to discover that the husband, son and entire life she has memories for, doesn’t exist. Throughout her physical, mental and social rehabilitation and with the help of her supposed brother, Brady (Steve Mallers), Jane must unravel the mystery of her life.
As director, writer and composer, Jonathan Oster wore many hats in the production of the film. Oster’s sister provided the original premise for “Jane’s Not Here,” and Oster said the script was inspired by relationships in his own life: the grief he felt after his father’s death, his closeness with his sister and the upcoming birth of his daughter.
Oster’s feature-film debut, the movie made fantastic use of Minnesota locations: a diner in Edina, a jail in Cottage Grove and, most notably, the University of St. Catherine’s hospital simulation center.
Since the premise of the story is incredibly surreal, a minimalist approach to filmmaking helped Oster “kind of just ground it in real life.”
In particular, he said he did not want the score to be epic or even remembered by viewers. Despite his intentions, the score is memorable in its ability to draw us into Jane’s mind and emotions.
The ambient hum goes back and forth between a gentle, comforting presence to a more goosebump-evoking sound, negotiating an ideal balance that supports Jane’s healing and the thrill of the plot.
When the frightening experience of waking up in a sterile hospital with the wrong memories and no answers overwhelms Jane, the score similarly overwhelms the audience — without distracting from the scene.
This captivating audio helped progress the story, but my favorite byproduct of the score was the emphasis on complete silence, which was intense in its own way.
Whether it was only Jane’s voice being drowned out or the total absence of sound, I was forced to sit with and embody Jane’s feelings of despair and insanity; yet through little scenes like her staring dissociatively at water flowing down the shower drain, I was also kept grounded in the stripped-down portrayal of real life.
Offering those scenes where I do not question the entire storyline but instead focus on a single moment helped make the pacing of the film believable. Jane is fighting the internal battle of understanding her memories and the external battle of convincing her brother to believe in her other life’s existence. Oster’s pacing acknowledges both struggles.
“Jane’s Not Here” needs the audience’s trust.
The smooth progression of Jane waking up in a hospital and demanding answers, feeling lost and confused and forcing herself to ignore her maternal instincts in order to heal but never giving up, despite her fragility, built my trust with the storyline and is a credit to the realness of both Jane’s experience and Barr’s acting.
Mind-bendingly, the script led me to believe what I knew was wrong.
It is in intimate moments that the script achieves this feat and truly shines: the moments between Jane and Brady where sibling love both breaks them and is the crutch they lean on; or, in particular, the tragic scene when Jane tries to recreate what it’s like to lay next to her husband, which is heartbreakingly honest in its portrayal of aloneness borne of once having and losing.
I believed Jane’s brother was an honest person. I believed Jane had a husband and son. I knew that both could not be true.
Believing in every aspect of the film meant I was forced to question my own beliefs.
“Jane’s Not Here” teaches us how trust is built between people and with the audience. I never questioned whether Barr or Mallers’ acting was realistic because I was already engrossed in the quasi-realness of Jane’s story.
In fear of the ending, I began to question whether Oster could do the story justice.
Would he fail the audience by either leaning into reality — Jane’s insanity — or the surreal, and lose the story’s groundedness?
Luckily, Oster did not let me down.
In a moment of tense possibility, Oster and Hayes ended with an idea: the transcendent power of love makes the surreal, real.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to decide between what to believe.
Open-endedness is often viewed as the easy way out, but a love like Jane’s cannot be so defined.
I think the ending, where all complexity melts away to focus, once again, on a single moment, was Oster’s way of saying “thank you” for trusting a story so close to his heart, of which clearly deserved to be his first feature film.
Leila Montoya can be reached at mont1761@stthomas.edu.
