I’ve always found The Yellow Wallpaper to be a profoundly haunting and unsettling story—its portrayal of isolation, repression, and psychological unraveling has lingered with me for years. I wanted to reinterpret that experience through the eyes of a 15-year-old girl, someone too young to be fully understood but old enough to feel trapped in the same cycle of fear, isolation, and detachment.

At its core, Lottie questions the powerlessness of fear—how, in trying to protect someone from losing themselves, we might unintentionally push them further into madness. Her parents struggle to help her, caught between love and uncertainty, while Lottie, feeling increasingly alienated, constructs her own reality. Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s protagonist, she spirals inward, her world shifting between what is real and what is imagined.

The film is both nostalgic and unsettling, using voyeuristic wides to create a sense of distance—as if we are intruding on something intimate yet unreachable. These are intercut with handheld Super 8 footage—a pure, subjective point of view from Lottie, paired with post-mortem voiceover, pulling us into her unraveling.

I was also drawn to the fragmented nature of memory and how our recollections often feel disjointed, especially in moments of trauma. Through subtle performances and immersive sound design, I wanted to ground Lottie’s world in realism before gradually pulling it away, blurring the line between her internal and external landscapes.

Ultimately, Lottie is an exploration of how we remember those who spiral. Do we see her as a broken girl lost to tragedy, or as someone desperately trying to make sense of her world through fleeting images and fractured recollections? The film doesn’t provide easy answers—only the sensation of witnessing something slip away.

—Bella Rieth