Manchester Animation Festival

Beware of Trains

Dir. Emma Calder | United Kingdom

Beware of Trains explores today’s voyeuristic culture of fear and uncertainty. A woman with extreme anxiety is devoured by four major preoccupations – the man she met by chance on a train, her dying father, her daughter’s safety, and the murder she dreams she has committed. Real life and her obsessional fantasies become blurred, causing her family life to degenerate. The more guilty she feels, about how these fantasies are affecting those she loves the worse they get. She longs to escape. Years later she imagines herself in analysis. She is both therapist and patient. She relives her past traumas, and these conversations form the structure for the film.