I Watched Her Grow

Director-writer Shea Formanes tells a modern fable in I Watched Her Grow about the isolation that can come from being different. The film is an Indie sci-fi drama feature film about a lively teenager named Ada (Michelle Colman Padron) who dreams of becoming a botanist. This is not a random selection of career, as her mother, Mirren (Eloisa Cardona) is a preternatural hybrid organism: half human, half plant, reminiscent of the Swamp Thing. Ada has spent her life learning to care for her mother, but the burden is crushing as Mirren is in constant pain, and her nature must be kept secret from the world. It’s a solitary existence for both of them. Then one day, Mirren dies. 

As Ada moves into young adulthood, she retreats into a shell, refusing to speak to anyone, including family friend Inez (Aarti Tiwari) who knew about Mirren and tried to help out. Ada’s self-imposed exile from the world ends suddenly one day when she encounters Wren (Taylor Freeman), a teenager in trouble. Ada reluctantly takes her in and discovers that Wren has a problem that Ada is uniquely qualified to help with. 

“…[Ada’s] mother…is a preternatural hybrid organism: half human, half plant….”

I Watched Her Grow is a layered experience touching on isolation, loneliness, coming of age as someone who doesn’t fit into classic societal roles, and the process of re-engaging the world after trauma. This is an ambitious set of aspirations for a film that runs 67 minutes. Impressively, Formanes mostly succeeds in hitting these marks. The film is heavy on dialogue versus action, and sub-standard audio quality makes some of the dialogue hard to understand. The cinematography is commensurate with a low-budget indie, which is to say, somewhat muted, with not much camera movement. We mostly get two shots of characters talking. This works for the most part but can seem a bit static at times.

One of the themes of the film is the treatment of those who are different. Formanes discussed her inspiration for I Watched Her Grow in the crowd-funding site she set up for the film. “As an Asian-American person in the film industry, I would be remiss to acknowledge that now more than ever, prejudice and discrimination against marginalized communities in the United States has become normalized, especially thanks to legislation that not only denies marginalized people their basic human rights, but punishes them for their very existence. In light of this, it’s important to create stories that not only celebrate differences but feature characters that are reflective of diverse communities through the lens of racial equity, queerness, disability, and the intersections of all marginalized people.”

I Watched Her Grow is a life-affirming story about dealing with otherness in a world that doesn’t celebrate it. It’s also a wild flight of fancy.