Once You Say It, It's Gone
A Case Study of Birdwatching (2021)
Written by Joshua Allen
Founder and Executive Director, The Atlantis Awards
“The film is clear about what it releases. It is quieter about what receives it.”
The Atlantis Awards Case Studies are not reviews. They examine the specific filmmaking mechanisms that make a work function, how those mechanisms are constructed across departments, and what another filmmaker might learn from them.
Content notice: this case study discusses death and dying, and references sexual content in general terms, along with the film’s complete narrative, including its ending.
Amanda Seyfried says that she wrote three books.
Then she says it again. Then again. She is not correcting herself or trying to persuade the woman beside her. The words simply recur, almost identically, the last repetition feeling quietly as futile as the endeavor now seems to be for her. The first time, the line tells us something about her life. By the third, it sounds as though she is trying to empty herself of it.
That movement—from possession toward release—is the governing action of Samantha Soule’s Birdwatching. Written by Daniel Talbott and directed and edited by Soule, the film places two women inside an unnamed natural landscape where death appears to have already occurred and memory remains unfinished. They speak about cities, marriage, work, sex, mothers, fear and dying, but the conversation does not accumulate toward explanation. Instead, recollections are spoken, repeated, echoed and gradually transferred between them until individual experience becomes difficult to keep inside a single body.
Near the end, one of the women articulates the rule directly: “Thoughts come and go before they leave here. Once you say it, it’s gone.” The line does not solve the film’s cosmology. It tells us what the film has been doing.
The Most Serious Casual Conversation
Birdwatching begins with the sound of a world continuing without explanation. Water trickles, birds call from somewhere beyond the frame, insects pulse, wind moves through leaves. Before the women have established where they are, or what they are, the landscape has already established its own duration.
The first exchange is almost mundane: “Do you think it’s dead?” “Probably.” “I thought I saw it move.” “It’s dead.” Thunder rolls for more than twenty seconds afterward. The exchange is not dramatized as an announcement that mortality will be the film’s subject. Neither performer loads the words with dread. Sharon Washington and Seyfried speak with the quiet concentration of people examining something immediately before them. Death enters as observation before it becomes autobiography, and that quality governs the entire film.
The women go on to discuss subjects that would ordinarily produce emotional punctuation—”Where did you die?” “The bathroom. In my house.” “Were you scared?” “I don’t remember. My mom held my hand.” “Were you in love? What’s his name?” “Do you miss it?” “What?” “Making love.”—without the performances ever becoming emotionally blank. Washington’s face can alter several times within a single held shot; Seyfried’s attention shifts between curiosity, recognition, caution and something approaching relief. But neither actor announces which feeling the audience should prioritize, and no line is isolated as the revelation the film has been waiting to deliver.
The result is not indifference. It is a different dramatic condition: death is no longer the crisis. It has already happened. Whatever pain accompanied it has passed beyond the point where greater vocal intensity could change the outcome. The women are not trying to survive dying; they are trying to understand what, if anything, they still carry. Soule’s direction respects that distinction—she does not ask the performers to demonstrate the enormity of the subject, because the enormity is assumed. What matters now is the strange ordinariness of continuing afterward.
That restraint prevents death from becoming spectacle, and it keeps the film from directing all feeling backward toward loss. Birdwatching is less interested in what was taken than in what may no longer need to be held.
When Memory Changes Hands
At first, the women’s memories appear to function conventionally. One woman says she came from the city. She had a wife. The wife worked in an antique store. They volunteered at an animal shelter. She attended Columbia and later taught there. These details create a recognizable human biography—education, work and marriage appear to distinguish one life from another.
Then: “I wrote three books.” Again. Again. The nuance is quiet, but present. Later, the two women begin repeating each other directly: “He didn’t talk much.” “He was shy.” “He was shy.” “Tall.” “Tall.” The exchange moves beyond confirmation. One person no longer simply listens to another person’s memory; she enters its language.
The first-date story extends that movement. The recollection begins in one voice—a real date in high school, an older boy, Chinese food, the expectation that he would want sex—and as it develops, the women begin carrying portions of it together. A line starts with one speaker and appears to continue through the other. A detail is supplied as though both have access to the same event. The film does not pause to explain the transfer; it allows grammar and editing to do the metaphysical work.
This is where Soule’s role as editor becomes inseparable from her direction. The women do not merely resemble one another emotionally—their speech is arranged until the boundary between testimony and recognition begins to dissolve. The question is no longer only whether one woman understands the other. It becomes difficult to determine who owns the memory, and that uncertainty matters because ownership has defined the earlier biographical details: my wife, my books, my mother, my first date, my death. As the film continues, experience becomes less securely attached to the pronoun.
Soule has described the film as finding its real logic in the edit. By the end, she has said, the women “share a brain,” and she connects that shared consciousness to the possibility that another person’s understanding may allow us to hear our own stories clearly enough to move into whatever comes next. That account aligns closely with what the finished film demonstrates, but the effect extends slightly beyond mutual understanding: the women do not only help one another interpret memory, the edit makes memory transferable. A recollection leaves one body, enters language, is received by another, and returns altered. Speaking does not preserve the experience in a more stable form—it reduces the distance between the person who lived it and the person who did not. Once spoken, the memory no longer belongs only to its source, which is why the repeated lines are not merely poetic decoration. They rehearse release: a fact is said until its hold begins to weaken, a phrase is shared until personal history becomes common material. The film imagines that perhaps a memory cannot leave us until someone else has heard it.
Waiting for You
The title initially appears to describe an activity performed by Washington’s character. Near the end, Seyfried asks what she is doing. Washington answers in one breath: “Watching birds. Is that stupid?” Seyfried answers simply, “No.” Then, after a pause, Washington adds the rest of it: “And waiting for you.” The second half of the answer changes the first.
Birdwatching is not simply a pastime occupying the woman while she remains in this place—it becomes a model for the film’s entire construction. Birdwatching requires attention without control. The watcher can choose a location, become still, listen closely and learn what movements might signal an arrival, but she cannot force the bird to appear. The activity is built around readiness rather than conquest, and that distinction explains the unusual dramatic patience of Birdwatching. The film does not move as though one woman possesses an answer the other must obtain. No puzzle is aggressively solved. No cosmological rule is exposed through escalating questions. Thoughts appear when they are ready to appear, memories arrive in fragments, and silence is not treated as a gap the film must urgently fill.
One woman has come; another has been waiting. The conversation creates the conditions under which something can be relinquished, but it does not dictate the pace of relinquishment. Waiting becomes active without becoming forceful—not the absence of dramatic behavior, but the decision to remain available for an event that cannot be manufactured. That quality distinguishes the film from stories in which movement is measured by visible action. A character does not have to leave the woods, solve her death or recover a complete biography in order for change to occur; the transition may consist only of becoming less afraid, speaking the thought that has remained, or recognizing that someone else can carry part of it.
When Seyfried asks Washington whether she is afraid, the answer is simple: “Not anymore.” The film does not crescendo around the words. Fear has not been defeated through confrontation. It has diminished through company—the other person arrived, and that was enough. Soule has since described herself as increasingly drawn to stillness, patience, listening and the refusal of a headlong drive toward action; the finished film makes that interest visible without needing the interview to explain it. Its form does not wait passively for meaning. It waits because waiting is how its meaning becomes possible.
A Place That Does Not Remember Its Name
The film never provides a stable geographic or theological answer for its setting. “What is this place?” “I don’t remember.” The reply denies the audience the kind of explanation that might turn the landscape into a mapped afterlife. It may be a transitional space, an imagined environment shared by the women, consciousness after death, memory before disappearance, or something the film deliberately refuses to define. Whatever the place is, it does not behave as though it was constructed exclusively for them.
Soule repeatedly leaves the women. The camera looks at a spiderweb suspended in the woods. Branches divide the sky. Water moves around stones. Flowers occupy the frame without symbolic emphasis. Mud, bark, cloud and grass receive time that could otherwise have been used to clarify the narrative. These images are not neutral establishing shots placed between important human scenes—they challenge the assumption that the human scenes are the only important events occurring. The women discuss love, sex, accomplishment, fear and death while the world continues being water, insects and wind. Their lives matter. The landscape does not require those lives in order to continue.
That creates an important counterweight to the intimacy of the conversation. If the camera stayed exclusively with the performers, the unnamed place might feel generated by their memories—a spiritual chamber existing to process their needs. By allowing the environment its own visual duration, Soule makes the women feel temporarily admitted into something older and less personally organized. Nature is not sentimentalized into paradise: the water is dark and sometimes muddy, the stable interior is nearly black, thunder crosses the opening, and the woods can appear welcoming and unreadable at once. The place offers no promise that suffering did not happen. It offers continuity.
Soule has described the natural world as operating on a clock far longer than the human body—the trees, water and land will continue after any individual life has passed through them, humanity being “a blip inside of this much longer story.” That account closely matches the film’s visual effect, but it does not exhaust it. The longer clock of nature does more than place human life in perspective; it provides somewhere for memory to go. The recollections spoken by the women do not vanish into blankness. They are released inside a world already filled with movement—water carries sound, wind passes through trees, birds call from beyond the visible frame. The environment does not preserve the women as monuments. It receives them as passing weather.
Emotion as Weather
Soule’s handling of the performers and her handling of the landscape are governed by the same principle: neither is forced into a fixed meaning. Washington and Seyfried perform with extraordinary economy, and Soule allows their faces to remain onscreen long enough for thought to move through them without immediately being named. A reaction may begin as curiosity, become recognition, briefly darken and then settle before the film cuts away. The face changes as a field changes under cloud cover.
Soule herself uses that comparison, describing thoughts moving across the actors as weather—shadow passing over land, wind disturbing tall grass, an emotional condition arriving and leaving without becoming the permanent identity of the person experiencing it. The comparison helps explain why the film refuses emphatic performance. If emotion is weather, the actor does not need to become grief; grief can pass through. Fear can alter the body without defining it forever. A memory can arrive, occupy language, and move on.
The film’s natural imagery is therefore not a parallel poetic layer added to the human story. It teaches us how to read the performances. A cloud does not explain why it casts a shadow, and a face does not need to explain every thought that crosses it—the audience is asked to observe change without immediately converting it into diagnosis. That is particularly important in a film concerned with what may remain after ordinary identity has begun to loosen. The women are still recognizable as people with histories, desires and distinct bodies, but the film no longer insists that every internal movement must be attached to a stable account of the self. Feeling occurs, it is witnessed, and it passes.
The Threshold
One of Birdwatching‘s strongest visual passages places Seyfried inside a dark stable. She is repeatedly framed against the brighter exterior, her body occupying the boundary between an interior that conceals her and an opening that renders her visible in silhouette. The architecture turns the frame into a division: darkness and daylight, inside and outside, enclosure and landscape, presence and disappearance. Within the stable; Seyfried holds a candle, then blows it out. For a moment, the darkness is total. The sound appears to respect the extinction—the ambient world withdraws with the image, producing a brief absence deeper than an ordinary cut to black. The film does not simply remove visual information. It allows sensation itself to stop. Then the trees return, wind returns, and a faint score begins to rise.
The sequence resembles a crossing without specifying what has crossed. It may represent the disappearance of a previous self, movement between layers of memory, or simply a formal rehearsal for the film’s final vanishings, and its power comes partly from its refusal to label the passage. The film continually constructs thresholds without defining one side as real and the other as unreal: the stable opens onto woods, land gives way to water, dialogue gives way to ambient sound, one woman’s sentence becomes another woman’s sentence, bodies disappear while objects remain. Every border is visible. None is completely secure.
The threshold sequence does not illustrate death as a single irreversible event. It suggests that disappearance may occur repeatedly and in degrees—a sound can leave before the image, a memory can leave one speaker before entering another, a person can remain physically visible while part of her biography has already loosened. The candle goes out. The world returns.
Music After Erasure
The sound design follows the same ethic of restraint. For the opening movement, nature supplies nearly everything—trickling water, bird calls, insects, wind and thunder. The environment does not accompany the conversation; it surrounds and occasionally exceeds it. The composed score, by David Gonzalez, arrives only after the stable has fallen into darkness, and that timing matters. Music does not introduce the film’s metaphysical dimension—the women have already spoken about death—nor does the cue swell beneath an explicit confession. It emerges after a moment of formal erasure, when image and ambient sound have briefly been withdrawn, so the music feels less like an instruction to grieve than a new condition becoming audible.
Piano and bowed strings bring patience and solemnity; plucked strings introduce a more searching quality, curious and almost playful, without displacing the stillness beneath them. The score holds contemplation and discovery at the same time. Then it leaves: before the conversation reaches some of its most intimate material—dying in a bathroom, a mother holding a hand, first love, sex, fear—the music withdraws and ambient nature resumes control.
This is one of the film’s most disciplined decisions. A less restrained construction might have used music to certify the importance of those revelations. Birdwatching instead removes that emotional support, so the performers, pauses and surrounding world must carry the material without orchestral insistence. The score does not own the feeling. It enters, alters the air and departs—like memory, like weather.
A Trampoline, Not a Blueprint
The film’s production history clarifies why the finished work feels simultaneously written and discovered. Talbott originally conceived the text as a theatre piece for two men sitting on a park bench overlooking the ocean. In the autumn of 2020, Soule was beginning to identify an artistic language of her own after years spent primarily acting in or helping produce projects initiated by others—the film would become her directorial debut. Talbott sent her the text with unusually broad permission: use what you want, he told her, slice it apart, cut it up, treat it as a trampoline. He did not offer to supervise the adaptation or provide rewrites, and wanted Soule to make the work without having to preserve his original configuration.
She relocated the piece to the Hudson Valley and cast Seyfried and Washington, both friends living nearby; Seyfried was heavily pregnant and gave birth shortly afterward. Rob Whittlesey—a documentary filmmaker credited as cinematographer, and by Soule’s account her father—shot the film, with Lovell Holder, Soule, Addie Johnson Talbott and Talbott himself producing. They filmed with essentially no conventional crew, using a lavalier microphone and boom while maintaining pandemic-era physical distance. The exterior locations belonged to their immediate lives.
The film did not begin with a complete shot-by-shot architecture. Soule gathered performance, landscape, fragments of text and environmental material, then discovered the work’s final logic through editing. That history does not create the interpretation that memory becomes release—the finished film makes the process visible on its own—but it clarifies how the effect was assembled. Talbott’s text supplied language. The actors supplied bodies and private rhythms. The landscape supplied duration, weather and scale. Soule’s edit decided when those elements ceased to belong separately.
The original theatrical premise—two people talking on a bench—could have preserved dialogue as a stable exchange between distinct speakers. The film dismantles that stability: it places bodies at different distances, separates voices from faces, interrupts conversation with the natural world and allows repetition to reorganize what the words mean. Soule did not merely film Talbott’s scene. She changed the conditions under which language could retain ownership. Her own description of the text as soil is useful here—soil does not dictate the shape of what grows from it, it carries material forward while allowing that material to become something the original source could not fully predetermine. The finished film remains recognizably built from Talbott’s writing. Its meaning is inseparable from Soule’s arrangement.
The Objects Left Behind
Near the end, the women sit together beside the water. Earlier, the camera has watched feet enter the stream, shoes meeting mud and bodies gradually moving closer to the element that has sounded beneath the entire film. The water does not function as a conventional symbol of purification—nothing is visibly washed clean. It functions as continuity through movement: the same water can touch a body and continue after the body leaves.
Then the women are gone. Chairs remain. Boots remain without feet inside them. The film does not show a departure. It shows the evidence that presence has ended. That distinction completes the formal argument: an object once carried a person, and now it does not; a chair once held a body, and now it is empty; a memory once belonged to a speaker, and now it has been said.
The final movement returns attention to sky and sound. Birds continue calling. The natural world does not fade simply because the human exchange has reached its endpoint. Soule has said that she wanted the women surrounded and held by a container that would continue after them, and she particularly values that the final soundscape “just goes”—that the world remains available to receive whoever arrives later. The film accomplishes that intention without turning continuation into reassurance. The women may have moved forward. They may have disappeared. They may have become less separate from the place around them. Birdwatching does not require us to choose. By the time their bodies are absent, it has already loosened the expectation that a person must remain visually or biographically intact in order for something of the encounter to continue. The landscape retains no explanatory monument to them. It keeps moving.
Once You Say It, It's Gone
Many films about death are organized around preservation. A photograph is protected. A story is reconstructed. A voice is recorded. Memory becomes the means by which the dead resist disappearance. Birdwatching imagines another possibility: perhaps memory also has to end—not because the life was unimportant, but because importance does not always require permanent possession.
The woman wrote three books. She had a wife. She volunteered at an animal shelter. She went to Columbia. A mother held someone’s hand in a bathroom. A shy, tall man took a girl to dinner. Someone wanted the lights on. Someone threatened to leave if they stayed on. These details are not erased by being released. They are allowed to complete their movement: one person speaks, another person hears, and for a moment the experience exists between them. Then the world receives what neither body needs to carry alone.
That is the quiet metaphysical proposition beneath Birdwatching: we may not be able to relinquish ourselves in isolation. A memory may need a witness before it can lose its ownership. A life may need to be heard—not preserved in full, not explained, not resolved—before it can become something other than the person who lived it. The film never tells us what that “something” is. Water, air, another consciousness, nothing—the answer matters less than the release.
“Once you say it, it’s gone” initially sounds like a warning about disappearance. By the end, it begins to sound like permission. The thought can go. The fear can go. The body can go. The birds remain beyond the frame, calling into a world still capable of receiving whoever comes next.
The film is clear about what it releases.
It is quieter about what receives it.
Editorial Postscript
Version Note. The film’s public credits identify Samantha Soule as director; Daniel Talbott as writer; Lovell Holder, Samantha Soule, Addie Johnson Talbott and Daniel Talbott as producers; Rob Whittlesey as cinematographer; David Gonzalez as composer; and Amanda Seyfried and Sharon Washington as the two performers, credited as “Young Woman” and “Woman” respectively. No verified shooting script, shot list, or edited transcript was located for comparison; Soule has described the production as having used neither.
A Note on Sourcing. The composer credit, the full producer slate, and the corrected budget-and-shoot-length questions raised during initial research (a one-day-versus-two-day shoot, a zero-dollar-versus-two-thousand-dollar budget across different outlets) come from outside sourcing rather than the interview; where sources conflicted, Soule’s own first-person account of a two-day shoot is treated as authoritative over secondary press describing a single day.
The reading of memory as something the film treats as needing to be “released” rather than “preserved,” the water-as-continuity-not-purification argument, the emotion-as-weather framework as a lens for reading performance rather than only landscape, and the threshold/candle sequence as a rehearsal for the film’s later disappearances are Atlantis interpretations of the released film, not terminology or analysis attributed to Soule or Talbott. Soule’s own comparisons—”weather,” “a blip inside this much longer story,” the film “just goes”—are direct quotations, extended here rather than replaced.
Sources and Research
- Atlantis interview with Samantha Soule, September 4, 2026 — production account, direct quotations, and thematic framing throughout.
- indieactivity, “Case Study: The Filmmaking of Birdwatching by Samantha Soule” — shoot length, budget figure, and festival-screening list (HollyShorts, Hudson Valley Film Festival, SCAD Film Festival; award wins at these were not independently confirmed).
- Directors Notes, “Premiere: Birdwatching by Samantha Soule,” October 2, 2024 — director’s statement on the film’s origins, production details, and the 2024 online premiere.
- Letterboxd, Birdwatching (2021) — cast and crew corroboration.
- Vail Film Festival, official program listing — synopsis, runtime, production year, festival premiere date, and credits.