Kitchen Sink

Originally published without a star rating in Issue 15 of VHS Tracking (October/November 2021), a film zine edited by Tristan Fidler which is presented in the format of those ‘We Recommend…’ pamphlet guides once available in video rental stores. You can grab a copy at the zine’s Big Cartel store.

Kitchen Sink (Alison Maclean, 1989)
★★★★

While doing the dishes, a thirtysomething woman living alone (Theresa Healey) notices a string of hair caught in the drain. She tugs at it, curiously at first, then obsessively – it keeps coming and coming, getting longer and thicker, eventually revealing itself to be an umbilical cord attached to a foetus. Horrified, she dumps it in the garbage. But something compels her to retrieve it, then wash it. A rapid metamorphosis ensues: the foetus turns into a catatonic adult male (Peter Tait), covered in hair from head to toe. This creature will soon become her aggressor, then her lover, then her victim – a Pygmalion creation that she both fears and desires.

A “kitchen sink drama” in the most literal sense, Alison Maclean’s Kitchen Sink takes the titular sink as the starting point for an ambiguous, darkly comic horror that is inflected by the quotidian from start to finish. With echoes of Eraserhead, The Fly and Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Maclean’s surreal short is loaded with symbolism but also functions as a portrait of a lonely woman, for whom the domestic space is alternately a site of dread and of escapist fantasy. It’s one of the rare films that might forever change your perception of an everyday place or object. Every time I swim at the beach, I’m reminded of Jaws; a flickering computer screen will always take me back to Pulse. Whenever there’s a hair caught in the drain, it’s Kitchen Sink.