A strong, sobering writing-directing debut, Shatara Michelle Ford’s Test Pattern traces the contours of a relationship that is rocked when the woman is sexually assaulted while out with a friend. The next morning, her boyfriend guides her through the increasingly byzantine and bureaucratic process of filing a police report and obtaining a medical examination. In the early scenes, Ford nicely sets up the cozy, comforting rapport between Renesha and Evan (Brittany S. Hall and Will Brill, both giving confident, lived-in performances). The night of the assault, meanwhile, is depicted with a nightmarish abstraction—especially after Renesha and her friend (Gail Bean) are approached by two men who ply them with drinks and, it’s implied, roofies of some sort. While Renesha is dancing, Ford employs streaking colors and incisive edits to capture her increasing incoherence (at one point the friend seems to be struggling to push away one of the men, but a few edits later she seems to be dancing happily with him). Waking up in a hotel room with the other man, Renesha has no memory of leaving the bar, aside from traumatic flashes that intermittently occur after he abruptly drops her off in the early morning. The rest of the film details Renesha’s stunned trauma and Evan’s insistence on taking action, despite the fact that the system seems incapable of delivering either care or justice. Given that Renesha is Black and Evan is white, as well as the fact that she is a corporate manager and he is a tattoo artist, there are issues of race and class at play in how various law and medical professionals deal with them, something Ford doesn’t emphasize too strongly but rather lets quietly seep into the atmosphere. If Test Pattern feels a bit unfinished by its end, it’s not because I wanted resolution—documenting the refusal of resolution seems to be the point—but because there seemed to still be more, especially between the main couple, to explore.
(11/22/2021)
