Rob Munday

The emotional aftermath of sexual assault must be unimaginably complex, making it one of the most challenging subjects a filmmaker can choose to explore. Drawing on his own experiences, writer-director Andy Reid confronts that reality head-on in his SXSW short Brief Somebodies, crafting a deeply personal film that transforms trauma into a powerful and unforgettable viewing experience.

Reid’s short opens in darkness, with a filmmaker watching audition tapes of actors reading from his script, before moving into a rehearsal space where he begins working through scenes with the performer he has cast. On a mattress, separated only by a squeaking rubber ball placed between their bodies, the pair rehearse dialogue and carefully choreograph an intimate scene. As the rehearsal unfolds, the director – who also stars in the film – is forced to balance the practical demands of filmmaking with the far more personal task of confronting his own unresolved trauma.

“I couldn’t tell if it would be cathartic or traumatizing to recreate it over and over”

Brief Somebodies began as “an exercise for myself,” Reid explains, revealing that the project was originally conceived as a feature. The writing process proved physically and emotionally demanding. “I repeatedly found that my shoulders would be hiked up to my ears,” he recalls. Unsure whether revisiting his own experience of sexual assault would be “cathartic or traumatizing,” Reid describes the process as “a constant state of negotiating how much of my own comfort I was willing to spend on this story that I told myself didn’t need to exist in the first place.”

Feeling dissociated after his own assault, Reid recognised that directing demands the exact opposite: a filmmaker has to remain “incredibly present and tapped into the moment”. Rather than shying away from that tension, he chose to lean into it, using the filmmaking process as a way of exploring his own experience while creating something with genuine emotional resonance. “I ended up with all these questions about the process for everyone involved,” Reid explains, describing how he found himself wrestling with both “the personal toll it would have on me, and the professional ethics of making my colleagues go ‘there’.”

“On set, we were adjusting in real time. Things would come up while filming a scene that were then included” – Reid on the production process

While the process was clearly a conflicted one for Reid, he also recognised that this particular perspective on sexual assault felt largely unexplored on screen. The film-within-a-film structure gives Brief Somebodies an unusual intimacy, inviting us into the headspace of someone trying to understand not only what happened to them, but how to live with the contradictory emotions that follow. Rather than presenting trauma through hindsight, the film captures the act of processing it in real time.

Reid never explicitly says whether making Brief Somebodies proved cathartic or traumatising, and perhaps that’s beside the point. What the film does achieve is the creation of a space where difficult conversations can exist with honesty and nuance. In doing so, it feels like the kind of work that may help others navigate similar experiences and, perhaps most importantly, remind them they are not alone.