Chris Saunders

‘Stranger Situations’ (2019) is a thriller that re-works several versions of the seminal child development experiment ‘The Strange Situation’ in which the child is repeatedly separated from and reunited with their care-giver in order to show the importance of child-parent bonding in providing a 'secure base'

for the child's psychological development.

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In the experiment a stranger enters the room and is left to care for the child

while the parent leaves the room and returns. By inverting the role of stranger and caregiver Saunders eerily suggests how a child’s development can be unconsciously shut down and conditioned to take the first baby steps towards creating a false self and the often unspectacular and disabling misery of an emotional half-life in adulthood.