‘Go For Grandma’ Review: An Endearing Fantasy Short [Seattle Film Festival 2024]
“The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it. All too often these ill-conditioned implicit beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives. We create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and then we forge our present experiences from the meaning we’ve created. Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past…”
It is very common for a film centring on the mistreatment of children to take on the extreme measures that are often characterized through immense physical and verbal abuse. Sabrina Doyle’s short film ‘Go For Grandma’, which won the Grand Jury Award Best Short Film at the Seattle Film Festival, along with several other accolades, explores the subject of childhood trauma through the abuse caused by constant neglect and deflection.
Go For Grandma centers on the viewpoint of an seven year old New Yorker named Lucian (Austin Schoenfeld) who lives with his mom Blake (Justine Lupe, Succession). The first scene of Blake and Lucian eating together at a pizzeria seems innocent and even delightfully quirky in how the mother playfully teases her son about denying him a pizza slice, which she eventually gives him. But the moment that they go into the privacy of their own home is when the core element of Go For Grandma’s handling of child abuse truly unfolds, as Blake causally sends her son to his room as she dances to Icona Pop’s “I LOVE IT” with the vibrant youth of a teenage girl. On the surface, the enthusiasm that characterizes Blake’s energetically passionate dancing can be seen as innocent. However, a closer look at Lucian’s response and the disappointment he wears only illustrates the lack of a conventional approach in its exploration into child abuse Go For Grandma is tackling. Even the endearing bond Lucian is shown to have with his grandmother played by Amy Madigan (Pollock, Gone Baby Gone, Field of Dreams) isn’t portrayed in the pixel perfect depiction many films of a similar nature often convey.
The scenes of Lucian and his Grandmother communicating through the use of walkie talkies is meant to invoke an empathetic and endearing sense of compensatory love between a grandmother and her grandson, especially given the neglectful nature of a mother who behaves more like a child rather than a fully functioning adult. At the same time though, instead of outright demonizing what is clearly a very flawed mother like Blake or even deifying a kind hearted grandmother, the film instead gives a more authentic spin on the dynamic of a more complex relationship where through an aggressive verbal exchange that doesn’t say anything explicit but enough to showcase that both grandmother and mother have their collection of faults in their styles of parenting.
What is brilliant about the approach that Go For Grandma takes is that it gives the story a more realistic take on family dynamics and the imperfection many films centering on dysfunctional family relationships fail to capture today without having to sacrifice the importance of the fantasy element of the film where Lucian goes on all sorts of magical adventures involving dragons and violent storms. This incorporation of fantasy mixed with the real-life trauma that surrounds a child like Lucian encapsulates the deeper themes of preserving childhood innocence in the face of trauma that if not addressed can have a dire cyclical nature to it. This point was further elaborated by director Sabrina Doyle who stated that “Go for Grandma is about the resilience and imagination of children in the face of trauma inflicted on them by damaged adults. It draws on the '80s fantasy films we all grew up on — films like The NeverEnding Story, E.T. and Labyrinth. Films that don’t shy away from darkness even as they’re magically transporting us to other worlds.”
Cinema has always had the figurative power to act as a way of transporting us as an audience into other worlds. Much like the innocent Lucian, journeying into these worlds can entertain and help us confront the parts of ourselves we feel were either wounded or never given the voice a film like Go For Grandma went for.