Short Film: Pinched - An 11 Minute Animation About Hearing Voices, Agency, and Who Gets to Make Your Decisions
Pinched is a beautifully strange 11-minute animation about a man who hears voices and has become remarkably functional while stricken by a profoundly dysfunctional relationship with them. Jack moves through an underground city as a gifted pickpocket, accompanied by entities that cajole, insult, command, and seemingly possess considerably more confidence about the direction of his life than he does. I can certainly relate to much of this and am sure many here can too.
Then something unexpected interrupts the arrangement: human connection.
A stolen object reconnects Jack with a woman from his past, and suddenly the unquestioned authority of his voices isn't so unquestioned anymore. The story becomes less about whether the voices are "real" and more about who gets to decide what Jack does next.
That distinction is probably the reason I'd recommend this to voice-hearers. The film gives the experience form without spending eleven minutes litigating its ontology. Jack's world is simply presented as Jack experiences it.
I do have one substantial HVN-ish criticism of it: the official synopsis ultimately frames love as defeating the voices and even as a "cure" for Jack's sickness. That's a fairly conventional psychiatric/redemption ending grafted onto a film that, for most of its runtime, is doing something much more interesting.
I'd rather read the ending as agency instead of cure.
Jack doesn't triumph because someone proves his voices aren't real. He discovers that their instructions aren't sovereign. There are other relationships, other motivations, and other possible ways of being in the world.
For an 11-minute cartoon, that's an unusually rich depiction of voice-hearing.
And visually it's fantastic, angular, grimy, exaggerated, vaguely noir, with Jack's internal experience bleeding naturally into the physical environment. It feels much closer to somebody attempting to show you what an experience feels like from inside it than making a clinical illustration of schizophrenia.
I suspect given the tone and candor of this short film that it was directed/made by people who've walked a very similar path to all of us here. In many ways this film proves and I hope shows you how surmountable this hellish affliction is.
Thank you for believing in yourself, love to see your thoughts!