Timber
After failing to capture her corporate dreams, 38-year-old Zora returns home
where she is faced with her aging father’s hoarding and a struggle to make her homecoming matter.

It was philosopher George Berkley’s work that famously posited: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound”? Philosophically what this quote has come to mean over the years is an existential question about whether something can exist if it cannot be consciously perceived? When applied to the construct of loss and how individuals process their grief, it beggars the question: If no one can consciously perceive how an individual is coping with their grief, should it be assumed--just like the tree in the forest--they’re not falling? Consequently, if you can’t see or hear them falling, then they don’t need someone there to catch them, right? 

Wrong. 

Timber, poignantly written by Jess Waters, paints a subtle, unique perspective on loss. Specifically, how it impacts the immediate family left flailing in the wake of sorrow. How each manages the ache in their heart. And how that ache expresses itself in relationships, the way we live, and the choices we make. 

At the start of the story, we are introduced to Zora – a woman in her late-30s, as she arrives at her family home. A place she hasn’t presumably visited in a long time. This is clarified in the way she approaches how to enter the house. 

Zora raises her hand to knock but thinks better of it.  

She uses her shoe to nudge a decaying frog statue aside.  

A bronze key sits under it. She nabs it and sticks it into the door. 

Her hesitancy is a striking subtext that speaks volumes softly. The reason for her uncertainty comes into focus once she enters the house. As she finds herself confronted with piles of junk. A hoarder’s maze. She navigates through the clutter until she reaches her father, ‘Coleman’ in the kitchen. From first contact, it’s obvious their dynamic is strained to the point of estrangement. Coleman barely acknowledges the presence of his daughter. At least not until she makes an off-handed comment about the state of the house inducing feelings of claustrophobia. This seems to elicit a passive aggressive response from Coleman.

COLEMAN 
Good thing you left that big city 
behind, then, huh? 

The stifling environment of the house aptly reflects in the repressive communication between father and daughter. The story does an impressive job of subtly getting to the root cause of their rancor: how they both dealt with the death of a wife and mother. You have Zora through her actions making it clear that she is disgusted with the state of their family home. Asking her father multiple times why he has so much ‘stuff’ around. Conversely, the Father is more circumspect in his criticism of Nora. It’s not until he finds her attempting to sleep outside on the porch, does he hint at some of the anger he has been harboring and hoarding. 

ZORA 
I can’t sleep inside. 

COLEMAN 
Aww, hell. 

NORA 
Dad, you’ve got a problem.
I could barely get through the door. 

COLEMAN 
It's been five years since I last saw you.
Don’t act like you care now. 

ZORA 
This was a mistake. Coming back here. 

The writer deftly handles why father and daughter have barely spoken for so many years: One couldn’t stay. The other couldn’t let go. A seemingly impassable junction--as compromise is needed on both sides to build a bridge. 

Eventually a delicate détente manifests in a most unexpected yet touching way in Timber, as Nora and Coleman find a common cause that prompts them to try a little give and take. It’s a small thing. But as the expression goes: from big oaks little acorns grow. Sometimes it takes sowing a singular seed of concession to grow a tree of reconciliation. 

In Timber Jess Waters has written an elegiac subtext-laden tale of the delicate bonds between parents and children in the aftermath of losing a partner and parent. And how when this happens, occasionally both get lost in their own sorrow and forget about the importance of shared comfort. They lose touch with the roots that bind them. 

For a filmmaker in search of a human story with meaning and heart it doesn’t get any more perfect than Timber. In the right hands, it could be a film festival darling.