Amber (Sharlene Cruz) is woken in the early hours of the morning to an upset call from her boyfriend, Justin (Dario Vazquez), but what is he ‘so sorry’ about exactly? We don’t discover that immediately, but we can soon glean that he’s not hurt or sick or anything like that: judging from Amber’s furious response (the couple take their quarrel out into the desert the following day), he’s been playing away.
Is this all real? The stress is maybe making Amber confused, but what does seem to be real is that she catches her hand on a cactus, puncturing her skin with a splinter. Something else is real, too: this relationship is over. Done.
So Amber gets back to her life – work, friends, apartment – but that injury on her hand looks like it’s getting worse. She can’t get the splinter out, and the wound is becoming irritated. Worse, she seems to be disassociating from her surroundings: day and night is snapping by in a heartbeat, or she’s zoning in and out of what’s going on around her. Amber also starts to hyper-fixate on little things around the apartment which have clearly bugged her for a while. Most of these are linked to Justin – who seems to have been very much an Ask Aubry kind of boyfriend – a man who thought nothing of trashing the place because hey, it won’t be him cleaning it up. Amber’s memories of her last relationship all seem to hinge on Justin’s selfish bullshit around the apartment, and the physical marks he made while there.
Hand offers a wealth of great details, starting with its big shift from Amber’s dark apartment to the bright, richly coloured desert scenes (shot in Phoenix), and it’s a surprisingly auditory horror too: lots of significant moments stem from seemingly innocuous sources, revealing Amber’s heightened state as she tries to navigate normal, everyday life (I’ve never been more on edge hearing someone chop an onion). There are great macro shots, too, providing additional texture and interest. These elements all conspire with clever writing to make our key character very likeable and sympathetic from the very outset. It’s an earnest, skilled performance from Sharlene Cruz, who gels really well with the fairly low key amounts of dialogue used in the film, bringing a lot to the role.
Essentially, what we have here is a woman who is working hard to reclaim her home and her space, and by proxy, her sense of self, gradually excising the memory of a crappy partner. The issue with her hand is a symbol of how much Justin got under her skin and hung on in there: the idea is used well, creating a snappy body horror out of a miserable and recognisable situation. There’s a confidence here which does great things with the horror elements. Writer/director Jennifer Winterbotham, who recently had her feature script Birthright selected for the 2025 Sundance Producers Lab Fellowship, is a director to watch moving forwards, and it’ll be great to see what she does next.