Reviews
GAM x GI: Strange Evidence, Michelle Williams Gamaker, Offline
Review by Shalmali Shetty
GAM x GI:
Strange Evidence, Michelle Williams Gamaker
Offline, 5 – 21 June, Glasgow International 2026
Every face before the camera seems to carry the weight of its own visibility. Across a series of conversations and analytical questions, and through repeated returns to an unsolved puzzle and a set of anagrams, the psychoanalyst attempts to draw out Merle Oberon’s inner world. What emerges at the end is a kind of slippage between forgetting and identity: an amnesia that suggests, “Me Asian”.
This year, the Southside’s very own cinema, Offline, returns with another thoughtfully curated film programme by Lydia Honeybone and their team, presenting Michelle Williams Gamaker’s Strange Evidence for Glasgow International 2026. For weeks, I have been fixated on the posters circulating online, centering on a series of images of a woman: a white mask, a latex face, a head wrapped in bandages behind dark sunglasses, a folding hand fan that only partly reveals the face; monochrome portraits and celluloid close-ups drawn from a mid-century studio aesthetic, where the gaze is either absent or averted and apprehensive. Some images unfold within clinical setups under the observation of surgeons and the glare of surgical lights; others are staged beneath a harsh spotlight, framed as evidence before the watchful presence of the public. Together, these images seem to carry an air of film noir suspense while alluding to the trope of the femme fatale.
A hand-painted vintage film poster pulls me off the street into a temporary warehouse space, worn and slightly decrepit; then into a darkened cinema to sink into the newly-sewn plush red velvet seats. This aesthetic continues into the film itself, where the narrative slowly pans into the dark underbelly of the glamorous protagonist Merle Oberon, and the construction of her screen image in Hollywood.
Strange Evidence is the first film in ‘Fictional Healing’, following ‘Fictional Activism’ and ‘Fictional Revenge’, together forming Williams Gamaker’s ‘Critical Affection Trilogy’, which addresses marginalised film stars of the global majority working in Hollywood. Drawing on the cinematic world of Powell and Pressburger as a site for reimagining and recasting roles through speculative narratives, the series engages with figures such as Anna May Wong and Sabu, extending Williams Gamaker’s broader method of restaging stories that remain incomplete in their on-screen histories. This process of “resurrecting” these figures moves beyond archival retrieval towards an act of fictional repair and a kind of on-screen justice. In Oberon’s case, this involves revisiting a life shaped by the concealment of her real identity, a secret that she carried through to her death in 1979.
Oberon emerges as an unsettling figure, embedded within cinema history while her racial identity remained obscured. An Anglo-Indian, born to a Sri Lankan mother and British father of Irish descent, Queenie – as she was formerly called – passed as white throughout her successful Hollywood career, navigating the Hay’s Code within an industry that offered few opportunities to actors of colour beyond marginal or stereotyped roles. The maintenance of her carefully constructed screen image required a form of deliberate amnesia and self-erasure of her South Asian heritage. To sustain this persona, she floated stories about her origins in the distant land of Tasmania, underwent skin-bleaching treatments and dermabrasion using ammoniated mercury, and relied on heavy makeup and specialised lighting techniques such as the Obie light (named after her) to also conceal facial scars resulting from a car accident. Complicating matters further, this coincided with the industry’s transition from black-and-white – in which she felt more secure – to colour film, where maintaining her identity became increasingly precarious and threatened her survival within a ruthless studio system.
Faced with the gaps surrounding Oberon’s life, Williams Gamaker draws on seepages through archival fragments, interviews, and film dialogues, as well as observation and speculation, to ethically approach Oberon’s inner world. Through psychoanalysis, she attempts to fictively reimagine a life already shaped by fabrication, while acknowledging what cannot be fully recovered. Cinematically, the film is set within the visual language of period drama and the body horror sub-genre, alternating between recurring monochromatic sessions with a psychoanalyst, where Oberon appears in various stages of facial transformation (including a resemblance to the bandaged figure of The Invisible Man), and colour sequences depicting surgical and cosmetic procedures on the face. She is akin to the Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies), a recurring motif tracing stages of metamorphosis through cocoon-like costumes and a translucent body bag. It becomes difficult to tell whether Oberon is actively remaking herself through the process of interpretation, or whether she is being interpreted by the psychoanalyst, Williams Gamaker, the viewer, or perhaps by me. A sense of empathy and pain permeates the exchange.
The most compelling moment of allyship occurred when Williams Gamaker brought the narrative into the physical space of the cinema through an in-conversation event, placing herself in Oberon’s position, while psychodynamic counsellor Oonagh Gaff questioned her in real time before an audience. In doing so, she reworks Oberon’s narrative through her own positionality: mixed-race, Sri Lankan and British, growing up in the UK; and through her early attraction to cinema, in which fantasy, fashion, glamour and success offered forms of escape. Williams Gamaker’s notion of “critical affection” and “fictional healing” sits at the centre of this approach. Neither judging Oberon nor romanticising her, they hold her contradictions without trying to resolve them, allowing her space to inhabit her own complexity and to explore her identity on her own terms.
As Williams Gamaker continues her dialogue with the counsellor, I find myself thinking about the different positionalities at play here; I imagine myself in her place. The film’s refusal to resolve her identity points to a longer history of uneven visibility, and in turn places us within that history. Merle Oberon’s negotiation of identity belongs to a specific studio-era system, yet the pressure to be assimilable still feels familiar in different forms today. Even as the conditions have changed, structural barriers persist.
Shalmali Shetty is an independent curator and writer based in Glasgow and working between the UK and India.
This review was commissioned by Glasgow Art Map and Glasgow International as part of a series that offers critical reflection on this year’s festival.