It’s almost Halloween, which means millions of people around the world will be scouring the year’s pop culture canon for dress up inspiration. Expect a few Menendez brothers, or Chloë Sevigny as their dead mum (a la Ryan Murphy’s Monster). Lady Gaga’s messy-bobbed Harley Quinn will replace Margot Robbie’s pigtailed version. There will be a lot of Moo Dengs. But for those after something a little different, a touch more niche, may I suggest a creation from writer/director Hweiling Ow’s short film: an anthropomorphic vagina.
Both the vagina and film in question are called Vivie. Without giving too much away, Vivie (the film) is about Vivie (the vagina) and her complicated relationship with Amy (the human that Vivie the vagina’s attached to). Essentially, Amy wants to shag someone, but Vivie does not want to be shagged – a tension that plays out in the short with humour, empathy and a human-sized vulva costume.
While we’ve had a few cinematic dick parties over the past few years (Barry Keoghan gyrating through a mansion in Saltburn, Theo James’ giant prosthetic in the White Lotus, that shower scene in Netflix’ Sex/Life that sent everyone on the internet), vulvas don’t get much screen time outside Pornhub. We did get some vagina-inspired attire on Emma Stone’s character in Poor Things, courtesy of a collection of ruffled blouses with slashes down the middle. But this takes the vagina costume to a new level.
To find inspiration, Ow made “a lot of Pinterest boards on vulvas,” she explains. She also recruited Anna von Harstitzch, whose creations have appeared in the World of Wearable Arts and knows a thing or two about making grand creations to put on bodies.
“We needed somebody who would know how to do something big, and make a statement,” says Ow. But there were also practicalities to consider – like actor Kalyani Nagarajan being able to actually move in it – and with a bit more time, she would’ve made the outfit even easier to wear. But, as Ow notes, “time is never on a filmmaker’s side.”
Over the past decade or so, Hweiling Ow has been honing her skills across the filmmaking board. She started acting in her 20s, and has appeared in everything from short films to Shortland Street, big budget shows like Our Flag Means Death to 48 Hour Film Festival productions. On the writing and directing side of things, Ow’s first short film concept, 2013’s T is for Talk, has nearly a million views on YouTube – and piqued her interest and aptitude for making horror.
More recently, she wrote and executive produced Grafted, a body horror that premiered at the 2024 New Zealand Film Festival. And as we speak, she’s hiding away in a quiet room on set – where she’s directing parts of local comedy TV show Homebound.
Despite all this experience, she hit pause before applying for funding from the NZ Film Commission for Vivie. “They had the question that’s like, ‘Who are you? What is your voice? And I honestly went, what is my voice? What do you mean?”, she says.
Part of this, she explains, is because she’s from Malaysia, so “being creative was not part of my repertoire as a child,” she says. “It got squashed, for survival reasons, and the perceived survival reasons that we need to have.”
So, when it came to the perennially difficult question of who are you, she had to sit and think about it for a minute. “That’s not a common thing in Malaysia. I learned that in New Zealand, when you do the English paper at school, you're encouraged to express your opinion. In Malaysia, they don't want that.”
After a little digging, she realised she’s in the game of making people laugh and feel uncomfortable, “almost at the same time,” she says. She also knew that she didn’t want to make what she describes as “migrant trauma porn.”
Ow explains, “I'm a migrant. I'm not traumatised like that, that is not my story. So I was very conscious about not writing it about race.”
Instead, she told a story close to her, about something that people don't talk a lot about – vaginismus, when the muscles of the vagina tense up or spasm when something's entering it (like a tampon or penis), which can cause painful penetrative sex. “The main story that I wanted to touch on is that, you know what, listen to your body,” she says. “We put it through so much for this idea of what intimacy is, and nobody knows what intimacy is. Everybody's got a different flavour of it.”
The result is a sweet, genuinely funny film that carries a message without being too didactic about it. The soundtrack is on point, the directing is sharp, and the performances from Gemma-Jayde Naidoo (Amy) and Kalyani Nagarajan (Vivie) could carry any coming-of-age Netflix show.
As for the vagina costume, that’s currently residing in a storage unit. So for any inspired trick-or-treaters, you’ll have to pull out the pink fabric and glue gun come Halloween.
Vivie is playing across New Zealand as part of the Show Me Shorts festival. Find screening times here.
