Warning: The following review includes mentions of sexual assault.
Test Pattern (2021)
dir. Shatara Michelle Ford
Rated: N/A
image: ©2021 Kino Lorber
There’s a chilling moment late in the indie movie Test Pattern that acts as its thesis statement. It’s a flashback to before the day-or-so period that makes up the bulk of the movie. In the scene, Renesha and Evan, the couple at the center of the story, are reading in the back yard when Renesha notices Evan looking at her. When she asks what he’s thinking, Evan, a tattoo artist, tells Renesha he’s thinking about what he’s “going to design next and brand on you; because you’re mine.” She smiles and responds, “I’m yours.” The actor playing Evan, Will Brill, plays the scene with a hint of aw-shucks awkwardness. You get the feeling Evan thinks he’s being sweet, but the ominous background score, as well as what we’ve seen Renesha go through in the past hour of the movie, makes him appear in this moment as anything but sweet.
This brief flashback moment is a little too on the nose to be really effective, but first-time feature filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford confronts both race – Renesha is Black, Evan is White – and gender power dynamics in her taut and, at 82 minutes, lean examination of sexual assault.
Test Pattern opens minutes before Renesha is raped. Earlier in the evening, she has met her friend Gail for a girls’-night-out at a local bar when two men approach them. They are tech entrepreneurs who have closed a huge business deal and they want to celebrate. The men give Renesha and Gail (what they say are) edible weed gummies, but, as we see in the opening seconds of the movie, Renesha is almost completely incapacitated by the gummy, unable to consent to anything. The tech-bro rapist has taken the drugged Renesha back to his apartment and assaulted her. When she awakens early the next morning, with no idea where she is or what exactly happened, her assailant hustles her home before speeding off in his car.
Over the course of the film, we see the hellish aftermath of the rape, interspersed with flashbacks of Renesha and Evan’s relationship. Ford weaves astute social commentary on both race and gender throughout Test Pattern. Ford wrote the screenplay and produced the picture using personal credit cards to get through the 20-day shoot, much like Robert Townsend and Kevin Smith did to make Hollywood Shuffle and Clerks, respectively.
There’s an uneasiness in the way Evan is comfortable in referring to branding Renesha. Those words coming out of a White man and directed at a Black woman are unsettling. Evan’s obsession with getting Renesha to a hospital to obtain a rape kit for his girlfriend – this single-minded goal takes up most of the movie’s runtime – allows Test Pattern to expose the patriarchy as well. Evan never says as much, because the character isn’t self-aware enough to make the realization, but his actions signal that he believes that, as a man, Renesha is his property, and his property has been damaged. His desire to document the damage, should they ever find the man who raped Renesha, is his primary concern. He never so much as asks once what Renesha wants.
There’s a sly moment in the movie when Renesha and Gail are talking at the bar about Renesha’s new job – Evan has encouraged her to give up her soul-sucking corporate job for a position with a non-profit pet shelter, work she feels good about. The two women are talking about how most of Renesha’s new co-workers are White, and how she’s determined not to talk politics around them. “You can never tell with White people,” Renesha says. Even in a liberal, non-profit setting, she says, you never know if White people support Donald Trump or if they might blame Sandra Bland for her own death. (Test Pattern was shot in 2018, in the middle of the Trump administration, and well before the George Floyd murder.)
Right on cue, the two tech-bros then interrupt by saying they couldn’t help overhearing the women’s conversation, and that they totally agree. Since time out of mind, men have been using the strategy of agreeing with a woman – whether they believe it or not – to get her into bed, but it’s easy to see how these guys might think they really are forward thinking, even while drugging a woman in order to rape her. That’s the exact point Ford is making in Renesha and Gail’s conversation before the two men introduce themselves.
Brittany S. Hall is electric as Renesha. The actor, probably best known for the role of Amber on the HBO series Ballers, carries the weight of the film on her shoulders. Hall gives us the pain, confusion, and desperation Renesha experiences throughout the movie with exquisite and heartbreaking detail. Will Brill – who played Scott in the Netflix cult-hit series The OA – is also good as Evan. His controlling behavior of, and disregard for, Renesha and what she is going through as he tries to obtain a rape kit for her is sickening. The two don’t share great chemistry in the scenes depicting happier times in their relationship; their meet-cute is charming enough, but I was never convinced of them as a couple.
Ford also has a bold, confident style as a first-time director. Not all of her creative choices quite work, but they are the result of innovative and creative thinking. Some of the camera movements feel self-conscious, and one music cue – using a piece from the Nutcracker Suite – feels out of place, more akin to a Kubrickian satirical juxtaposition than a social-problem film. I think Ford is using this moment to point out the farce of the medical field and how it fails people, especially Black female sexual assault survivors, but the moment doesn’t quite gel with the rest of the movie.
The most thrilling thing about Test Pattern is Ford’s unapologetic point-of-view. This is a story told from a Black woman’s perspective, and the director makes no concessions to any other gaze. Centering Black and female experiences in filmmaking has been a demand of those groups since long before the #oscarssowhite campaign of 2015/2016, and Ford, like Julie Dash, Spike Lee, Barry Jenkins, and many others before her, is blazing a trail in a new cinema focused on the diversity of human experience.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- Shatara Michelle Ford has made a striking entrance as a feature filmmaker. Test Pattern has a bold style and tells a powerful story.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Ford was born in Arkansas and raised in Missouri, but within the first five minutes of watching her movie, I immediately noticed that it had a very Texas-y feel. Sure enough, it’s set and was shot mostly in Austin. It’s an apt location, because while Austin might be the most progressive city in Texas, the state overall has a disgusting stance on women when it comes to regulating their bodies.
- You can tell Ford had limited resources, but only barely. Every cent of the budget shows up on screen. Cinematographer Ludovica Isidori’s work is gorgeous.
- Composer Robert Ouyang Rusli’s string-heavy score is evocative of Jonny Greenwood’s work, especially in the Radiohead song Burn the Witch from their 2016 album A Moon Shaped Pool.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw Test Pattern through a screener link from Kino Lorber, the film’s distributor. It’s available to rent and buy through most streaming platforms.