J Paul Johnson
After earning considerable acclaim on its festival run—racking up an impressive 34 nominations and 11 awards since its 2023 world premiere at Dances with Films—the acclaimed indie drama Bound is getting its theatrical and streaming premiere, debuting May 16 in major cities and simultaneously on most major digital platforms. With its record of success and in the wake of dozens of strong reviews, Bound has earned its day in the sun. It’s probably the only true-story-based female-centric coming-of-age Künstlerroman-cum-crime drama co-starring a pet pocket squirrel you will see all year.
As that particular sub-sub-sub-genre of filmmaking goes, Bound simply doesn’t work for me. It’s far too enamored of its own cleverness and conceits to tell a straightforward story from start to finish. There’s no crime in switching genres mid-narrative. Plenty of strong films do just that, but Bound loses sight of its promising premise, as if its makers (Broadway actor Isaac Hirotsu Woofter is writer and director) didn’t trust their own material. There are way, way too many ingredients in play here to yield a satisfying whole.
Bound‘s narrative begins with protagonist Bella (Alexandra Faye Sadeghian), dirt-poor but a talented artist who makes sculptures from scrap metal. She lives in out in some indeterminate backwoods, seemingly far from any town, with her emaciated, addled mother (Pooya Mohseni) and abusive, drug-dealing, mentally ill rage-roiding uncle/stepfather, Gordy (Byrant Carroll). Bella’s artistic aptitude has earned her admission to a prestigious New York art academy—a narrative fact shown in no fewer than five separate close-ups of the admission letter—but with no tuition money and no means of protecting her fragile mother from Gordy, Bella can’t go.
Until she decides she must.
And so, she packs up her cute pet pocket squirrel, pilfers Gordy’s cash stash, and heads to the big city, promising her mother she’ll come back for her someday, somehow. In New York after the shortest bus ride in cinematic history, Bella quickly gets scammed by a group of hard-partying punks, losing her phone in the process. Homeless and desperate—and sullen and surly AF, I’ll add—she soon finds herself with three new mentor/friends.
Pithy gay apprentice designer? Check. Fierce Latinx undocumented immigrant? Check. Traumatized veteran? Check. Though Bella treats each of the three like dirt, Bound‘s plot necessitates that they befriend and support her. The going-to-art-school-to-realize-one’s-dreams plot—the one that necessitated nearly a half-dozen close-up shots of the ever-so-important admission letter? Abandoned for what becomes in the film’s second half a crime thriller.
That switch depends on a plot point I can’t describe as anything other than outlandish. The undocumented immigrant in whose bar Bella ends up living—one bar among what are surely thousands in New York City—has a secret connection to demented, vengeful stepfather-uncle Gordy. Who, it turns out in Bound, is just a short truck ride away and hot on Bella’s trail.
Woofter’s script piles further indignities and absurdities on Bella until she and her newfound “bound” family of friends must bond together to liberate her from Gordy’s abuse. The film culminates in an action piece that is shot so as to refuse to show what is actually happening to the characters and confuse more than enlighten. At the end, a nondiegetic post-script refers viewers to the National Alliance on Mental Health Hotline—a sincere gesture, surely, but nothing in Bound seems to take mental health particularly seriously. In this film it’s just a trait, like having a talent with scrap-metal art or owning a pet pocket squirrel.
Bound suffers from a lack of confidence in its own story as it keeps piling on characters, twists, traits, and turns until it becomes, eventually, nonsensical. In the end, neither Bella’s artistic ambitions nor her pet squirrel have anything to do with anything. The narrative has the attention span of … well … a squirrel. A cute pet pocket squirrel, perhaps, but a squirrel nonetheless.
One can’t fault Bound for taking risks. It does so so constantly it can’t ever reap their rewards. The cast is game, beginning with Sadeghian, who is in every scene. The supporting cast is convincing enough, and Jaye Alexander in particular makes a memorable debut as Standrick, Bella’s gay designer friend. The squirrel is good too, for that matter. On the other hand, the abusive stepfather/uncle role is so overwrought it would frankly challenge any performer to deliver something credible. Ethan Startzman deserves kudos for a guitar-based score that ratchets up Bella’s emotional turmoil.
Overall, Bound is an earnest film striving for a gritty crime tale, aiming for something kind of like the excellent Winter’s Bone, the 2016 Debra Granik film starring a young Jennifer Lawrence, an Ozark neo-noir with a compelling, coherent story and a consistent directorial hand. Or, to take another female-centric indie film set in a similar milieu, there is Nicole Riegel’s excellent Holler, from 2021. Bound is no Winter’s Bone, nor even a Holler. Instead, it’s one of those where every effort to make it better seems only to further strain its already tenuous credibility. Given its festival success, it’s earned its wide release, but that fact doesn’t quite make Bound a film that makes sense.
