Bear Hug

Jake decided he was going to be in love with Eliza the moment he set eyes on her. Eliza is trying really hard to love Jake. Neither of them wants another failed relationship. But is theirs doomed from the start?

Jake wants to move on from his nebulous past but Eliza can’t quite shake the sense that Jake’s past is the manifestation of a darker more primal instinct which lurks beneath his child-like enthusiasm for the world and threatens to re-emerge. Jake wants to break through the barrier Eliza puts between herself and the world but the more Jake pushes the more tightly Eliza recoils.

Set over the course of a year in Eliza’s tiny inner city studio apartment, we bear witness to the gradual unraveling of their relationship as Jake and Eliza wile away the nights together in a seemingly futile effort to hold on to each other for just a little bit longer and fend off the inevitability of yet another failure. As they do, a voice in the darkness hints at a looming tragedy, which Jake and Eliza barrel towards, oblivious or perhaps deliberately defiant of its presence.

Bear Hug puts a diseased relationship under the microscope.