Acceptance Begins in a Single Pair of Eyes

Read Time:5 Minute, 33 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Freyr
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Genre: Drama, Short
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 17m
Director(s): David Telles
Writer(s): Tommy Orange, David Telles
Cast: Benairen Kane, Will Blagrove, Krista Hedins, Luke Baxter, Jay Liu, Auðunn Lúthersson
Where to Watch: shown at the 2025 HollyShorts Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: FREYR offers a twist with something that would be absurd in another film: a hand growing from a man’s chest. The image is impossible to process without curiosity. What would a life look like with a body so visibly different that strangers never learn to see anything else? Instead of treating the condition as a metaphor, the film places it within a funeral, where a coworker tries to make sense of the friendship that formed around that difference. By starting after Freyr is gone, the film collapses time. Everything we learn about him arrives through memory, grief, and the gratitude that comes from being truly seen by one person in a world that never learned how to look.

The logline suggests something surreal, but the story is surprisingly grounded. Director/co-writer David Telles approaches the film with the belief that people become narratives long before they can define themselves. Frank lived with something he did not choose, and Tom was the only person who saw the humanity in that fact rather than the spectacle. Their connection becomes the emotional core of the short. FREYR doesn’t frame identity as a burden to be endured or a tragedy to be solved; it treats difference as its own form of language. Tom remembers the ways Frank learned to read people through their reactions. Instead of explaining the world, the third hand explains everyone else.

This is a film built on a bond that could only exist between two people who feel outside the frame. Tom’s eulogy carries an intimacy that doesn’t rely on dramatic revelations. There are no secrets to uncover, only truths that were too personal for anyone else to witness. The writing allows silence to communicate what dialogue can’t. Freyr’s presence is felt through the uneasy laughter, the hesitation in Tom’s voice, and the absence that shapes the room. What the film communicates most clearly is how grief sharpens identity after someone is gone. People suddenly start asking questions they avoided while the person was alive.

The short format forces FREYR to distill its themes. It has to be selective about what it reveals. That constraint is part of its strength. Instead of commentary on discrimination or social panic over what is different, the film examines the mechanics of empathy at a personal scale. How do two people build trust when one of them has spent a lifetime being stared at first and spoken to second? The answer comes in the space between lines. Tom speaks like someone who learned to listen from the person he is now mourning.

Telles frames emotion without forcing it. The cinematography doesn’t try to make Frank’s condition into a special effect. The film avoids showing the third hand as a spectacle. It is part of the body, not the point. That restraint matters. It stops the story from collapsing into allegory. The camera looks at Frank the way Tom remembers him: as someone complex, flawed, sometimes funny, sometimes frustrated by the way the world refused to understand him.

Tommy Orange’s influence shows in the storytelling. The script carries a literary quality: introspective, unhurried, wounded without self-pity. The film allows characters to build through contradiction rather than clarity. Tom’s admiration is tinged with regret because grief always clarifies what was obscured by presence. He speaks about Frank like someone he is still trying to understand, someone whose courage wasn’t loud or performative, but existed in the small act of showing up in a world that never softened its gaze.

The thematic core of FREYR revolves around belonging. Not belonging in the abstract cultural sense, but belonging to another person. Frank did not fully belong to his community, but he belonged in Tom’s memory. That is both comforting and devastating. The funeral setting emphasizes how isolation can persist even in groups meant to honor someone. The room shares the moment, but Tom is the only one who truly knows what it means to sit with Frank without turning him into an explanation. The film suggests that acceptance is most powerful when it is quiet: one person treating you as human rather than remarkable.

FREYR is effective because it refuses to pretend it has answers. It ends with the recognition that seeing someone can change your own life even when it doesn’t change theirs. Tom walks away carrying a new shape of understanding. The third hand becomes something you forget you’re looking at by the time the film closes, because the emotional center has shifted from the physical anomaly to the invisible connection that shaped these two men.

The film’s impact arrives not through twists, but through the simplicity of its structure: a reflection, a memory, a confession of love that is never spoken as love. What Tom feels is deeper than language. FREYR understands that losing someone forces you to articulate what you never said. The film has the restraint to stop there. It doesn’t chase a cathartic ending, because grief doesn’t produce one.

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[photo courtesy of 271 FILMS, HILLMAN GRAD, MY OWN BACKYARD FILMS]

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