Isabella Ivos finds a fable in a dentist’s chair in ‘None the Wiser’

Writer-director Isabella Ivos built ‘None the Wiser’ out of a painful toothache, and she lays out how ideas born from everyday moments like that one survive the journey from notes to script to finished film. Placing the short beside her earlier ‘Robotica,’ where a woman surrenders her humanity to survive, Isabella turns to why the dread of leaving a piece of yourself behind keeps drawing her in, here through a young woman at the edge of adulthood who is about to lose her sense of play.

The story drops from a sterile dentist’s chair into a sedated dream, and Isabella explains how that cold, clinical start shapes the look of everything that follows. With cinematographer Barton Cortright, a previous guest on the show, she built a visual language that avoids the usual dream sequence tricks and keeps the anesthesia state tied to the body. Isabelle Grill and Zoe Ziegler face each other as two versions of one person, and she tells us what made their meeting feel like real inner dialogue instead of theater.

At under seven minutes, the film plays closer to a tale than a conventional short, and Isabella talks about how that framing let her bend pacing in the edit in ways a waking world story would resist. Its polished, high concept imagery points toward a first feature, so we close with the forthcoming challenges of upholding a controlled aesthetic once far more voices crowd the set, and the very first job she expects to hand off to someone else.

(Photo credit: Marcus Maddox)