As a former competitive dancer, Talking Body was written from a personal connection of feeling out-of-control of one’s own body. I wanted to juxtapose the feeling of being past one’s prime with the image of youth, to capture the elegant surface of dance contrasted with the underlying, bellowing chaos beneath. I employed surrealist influences and adopted gothic literature tropes to portray the Freudian phenomena of ‘the uncanny Other’ where repressed feelings manifest into the material world. These representations seek to illustrate that it is not Bella’s reality that is wrong, but our conception of her, our fear of the unknown and our compulsion to tame her that causes this sense of uneasiness. Her metaphysical existence throughout the film demonstrates how women parallel their environment in being unable to cement themselves in reality when external forces control the body and subsequently the trajectory of that body as they age. The tragedy of this film comes from an eternal mourning of a past that torments her present state. Though Bella is able to accept her temporariness, she is unable to move on.

During the writing process, I was inspired by speculative writer, Jeff VanderMeer and his Southern Reach trilogy which employs the metaphor of materiality where internal struggles of past traumas materialise into the real.