Matt Chandler’s Every Time I See a Yellow Car is a gripping, beautifully crafted short thriller that uses a childhood game to explore trauma, brotherhood and the dangers of confusing revenge with healing.
Trauma has a horrible habit of following you around; you try to run from it, but there it is, waiting to get you. Something that shouldn’t affect you at all suddenly becomes a massive roadblock you cannot mentally or emotionally get around, no matter how hard you try. In Matt Chandler’s Every Time I See a Yellow Car, we confront this fact in a short film that explores the pain of knowing how to deal with it. He has created a thoughtfully constructed film that understands this pain, almost as if it comes from a deeply personal place.
By focusing that one mental roadblock on a simple, innocent childhood game of yellow car, you would play in the car with family or friends, and making it the core of his film, Chandler, with the greatest ease, fills us with dread at the sight of the colour. His and Every Time I See a Yellow Car’s cleverness doesn’t stop there; it’s the fact that he doesn’t spell out his story for the audience that makes the film work so well.
The non-linear approach to the story works to its advantage as well. Chandler wants to disorientate us, make us uncomfortable. He hammers this home with Ola Shoyinka’s cinematography as the film gradually delves into a murky, ugly colour that unsettles you. The images are always striking; you want to look away, but you can’t. This distinctive look makes Every Time I See a Yellow Car a short film (running at just 14 minutes) that becomes essential viewing.
Ty Tennant is excellent as our protagonist, Olly; his impressive performance carries a painful vulnerability that makes it so effective. The little micro instances of self-harm that he commits are more a method of handling his anxiety and trauma. One that people who have lost someone or gone through something traumatic will know all too well. In fact, it pulls you in more as a viewer if you have experienced something that made you do this before. You see the signs, you know how helpless Olly feels, and worst of all, you know how hard it is to escape. He communicates everything with such powerful restraint that you can only be impressed.
This is where Every Time I See a Yellow Car is more than a conventional thriller. It works on you on so many levels that youare left asking yourself what you would do in that situation. Take the masculine, aggressive route and fight through it, even if it’s done with the best of intentions. Or the more contemplative one, to listen, to just be there for the person? Chandler happily tosses these questions and more our way throughout the runtime and lets us come to our own decision.
There is so much to admire within Chandler’s film. It tackles a difficult but important subject with sensitivity and understanding. Every Time I See a Yellow Car shows us that understanding trauma isn’t solely on the person experiencing it. It casts a wide net, and the right people need to be under it to successfully navigate eventual freedom from it. Matt Chandler grips us with his beautifully made film.
★★★★★
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