EIFF 2026: The Arrow at Rest at Every Instant of its Flight

A key motivation for Theodore Schaefer when making his second feature film, The Arrow at Rest at Every Instant of its Flight, seems to be to showcase the talent of his film’s star, Gus Birney, who plays three characters across three offbeat New York stories. As reasons for making a movie go, it’s a pretty good one, because she’s extraordinary. This former model is a Big Apple cool girl in the mode of Chloë Sevigny, but she’s also capable of the fast-talking sass of someone like Holly Hunter or the anxious kookiness of Carol Kane. She demonstrates all these modes across this trio of quirky vignettes.

In the first, she’s Violet, a mousy worker at a Coney Island arcade who longs for a more glamorous profession – like a waitress. She and her similarly jaded co-worker (played by Jack Haven) spend their days trying to appease their oddball clientele and dreaming up crimes they could commit to make rent. The second story sketches the dissolving relationship between a literary professor, Sinopia (Birney), and her nerdy dentist husband, Richard (Daniel Zolghadri), which reaches a head when they realise they’re sleeping with the same man, a William Blake-loving divorce lawyer played by John Early. And in the final instalment, Birney is a smooth pickpocket who turns altruistic hero when she finds a poetic suicide note in a wallet she swipes from an unsuspecting barfly (Roberta Colindrez)

Aesthetically, each segment coheres but plays out at its own unique rhythm. The first section is like an expressionistic Clerks with fabulously fragmented editing by Zach Clark (the director of Little Sister and White Raindeer) set to Scott Lane's urgent jazz score. The second section abounds with literary references, centres on two unconventional sexual rendezvous and climaxes with an extraordinary heart-to-heart on a claustrophobic elevator that suddenly becomes a moodily lit black box theatre. And part three mostly plays out as an intense conversation in a church and then as a high-stakes poker game that feels like a scene from a spaghetti western.

The connective tissue threading the film is an older lady who bears a striking resemblance to Birney (although that should be no surprise; she’s played by Birney’s mother, Constance Shulman). The older lady wanders New York City, confusing passersby with the same mysterious, Lynchian phrase: “Have you seen me? There's a woman who looks like me. She’s trying to swallow my life.” The suitcase she carries, filled with clocks set to different time zones, also appears to give her mastery of time. In a film that’s a glorious puzzle of references, she’s the biggest headscratcher.

The filmmaking (and the lively 16mm cinematography) is as unpredictable as the plot. Schaefer resists conventional film grammar at every turn. Striking compositions and jagged editing are the order of the day. The flipping of a coin becomes an epic setpiece; sex is represented by tantalising freeze frames; a conversation between strangers turns into a church confessional; and New York itself is transformed into a surreal kaleidoscope of coincidence and eccentricity, with an opening that suggests Woody Allen’s Manhattan but with the introduction of whip pans.

The script by Schaefer and Patrick Lawler is similarly surprising, and abounds with funky, poetic adages and dictums. The cast, meanwhile, is a who’s who of acting talent. The hot young things mentioned above all shine, and they’re supported by a murderer's row of character actors with incredible faces (Dylan Baker, Alex Karpovsky, Reed Birney – Gus Birney’s father). And as surreal as the stories get, their themes are pretty universal: making enough money to survive, finding genuine love, discovering some sort of meaning to life. Violent puts it best in the opening section: “It doesn’t matter what we need, love or money or the divine; we are claw machines, dangling and grabbing and dropping.” Schaefer doesn’t fumble, though. He’s in full control of this dizzingly inventive film. It’s a work steeped in film history, borrowing ideas and techniques from practically every new wave of the 60s and 70s (Schaefer has cited the Yugoslav Black Wave as being particularly influential), but it’s completely its own wonderful thing.