DISCLAIMER:
The following reviews
contain SPOILERS!

Ringing Rocks (2022)
Directed & Written by Gus Reed
Starring Hunter Doohan, Max Sheldon, Rhian Rees, Shaw Purnell, Leesa Kim, Robert John Sudhoff, & Robert Broski.

17 minutes

★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

Gus Reed’s Ringing Rocks is about a couple who go to a nice desert resort after one of them’s experienced a pretty serious mental health episode, and soon it’s as if reality itself has changed, or shifted. At first, the couple’s problems are centred on Cliff (Max Sheldon), whose recent issues relate to the death of his baby nephew. It isn’t long until even his partner Anson (Hunter Doohan) starts to feel like the whole world is crumbling around them, as sirens ring everywhere in the distance and nothing is as it seems any longer.

The whole atmosphere throughout Ringing Rocks makes the viewer feel unsettled. The plot could’ve used a bit more meat on the bones, yet the short’s very effective overall. By the end, reality is coming unglued. Ringing Rocks feels like an allegory about the current state of the world. Cliff and Anson attempt to shelter themselves from life’s harshness, if only for a little while, but realise they can only keep the cruel, and sometimes bloody, reality of life at bay for a short moment in time.

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High Fun (2023)
Directed by Adesh Prasad
Screenplay by Bhairavi Kulkarni / Yogesh Chandekar / Adesh Prasad / Naveen Sandhu
Starring Sohum Shah & Mohammad Samad

15 minutes

★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

The wild and grimy High Fun (a riff on the idea of party ‘n play, or chemsex) is an Indian film about a young gay addict who’s seeking more drugs to numb the pain when a friend comes by offering help that ends up not helping at all, in the most hideous sense. The addict (Mohammad Samad) is desperate for a fix, so he gets in contact with Naveen (Sohum Shah), an older married man with whom he’s had previous fun nights. Naveen’s gone clean and is now working for an addiction treatment centre of. He brings along something that’ll hopefully help his young addicted friend. Problem is, he has no real idea what’s in the baggie he offers, and though things go terribly wrong for his addict friend, the substance inside, with nasty effect, acts exactly as intended.

High Fun touches on a lot of stuff in only 15 minutes, from issues with drugs in the queer community, to national issues in India like the economy. At the start we hear people on television arguing: “The economy is screwed…” and “What are we as a nation if we have corrupt values?” and “Liberals like you…” There’s a reference to Rabindranath Tagore, an important Indian author, philosopher, social reformer, and more, as well as a significant figure in Bengali literature and music. The whole short itself takes on the way many governments, like in India and generally in most conservative governments, see addicts—not as people, but as vermin to be cleansed. When Naveen calls his boss, the latter tells him: “What you have done today is the work of a solider . . . This is our purpose, to cleanse this country.” Poor Naveen is one of those who genuinely wants to help addicts, as he was one once, too, but winds up under the thumb of those higher up the social ladder; he’s become a pawn in a deadly game of social cleansing. High Fun is gruesome and equally intelligent.

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In Your Hands (2023)
Directed & Written by Luigi Sibona
Starring Darryl Foster & Frankie Wilson

11 minutes

★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

In Your Hands depicts a strange, sensual relationship that brews between a customer (Frankie Wilson) and a barber (Darryl Foster) after the latter convinces his new client to have a hot straight razor shave. What follows is obsession and lust mixed together to an unhealthy degree. The customer can’t get enough of the barber, to the point things get awkward. When the barber has to kick the customer out of his shop, things get scary.

“It was special to me—I was yours, in your hands.”

There’s not a whole lot to In Your Hands, though it’s a wonderful little film. This one dances along the edge of sex and violence, as the barber carefully runs his blade along the throat of his customer, and the customer relishes in how close he is to having an artery opened up; the customer talks about how the barber has people “submitting” to him, putting their lives in his hands all for a shave. It’s an erotic short that ends with a bright red splash of violence. But, who’s doing the violence? You’ll have to see for yourself how this film plays out.

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La Vedova Nera (2023)
Directed & Written by Fiume & Julian McKinnon
Starring Ifig Brouard, Marina de Van, Guilhem Chamboredon, Aurélien Deseez, & Frédéric Morin.

21 minutes

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

The stylish and sleazy La Vedova Nera is a tale of a young man who takes a spill off his bike in the street and wakes up in front of a theatre inside of which lies a shadowy world of eroticism and murder. As the young man takes in an old film, he starts to see that within the theatre’s dark corners are hidden pleasures and thrills of all kinds. When he decides to step beyond the threshold into the darkness himself, he discovers that sex and death aren’t so far apart after all. If he’s lucky, he’ll make it out of the theatre and back to his bike again.

The young man, or the “wounded little deer” as a creepy, touchy clerk calls him, is like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. He looks into the shadows of the theatre and, after a bit of reluctance, decides he wants to experience some of the sensuality happening just beyond eyesight. Or, is the young man a precious butterfly himself—the sort of beautiful thing that others like to capture and contain? That fits well with Marina de Van playing a domme in the film-within-a-film, La Vedova Nera, tying a twink up into a bondage mummy hanging from the ceiling. A fantastic short that moves into the surreal but never strays from its dark eroticism that all but vibrates off the screen and into the loins.