DISCLAIMER:
The following reviews
contain SPOILERS!
Mercury (2023)
Directed & Written by Clara Dubau
Starring Angus North & Daniel Horvath
9 minutes
★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)
In Clara Dubau’s Mercury, a man takes part in a test of new virtual reality technology that allows people to access their own memories of the past and re-experience them. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, as he finds out after a trip into the virtual reality of his traumatic childhood. Admittedly, Mercury could’ve used a bit more time to flesh everything out. Nevertheless, it remains an affecting piece of cinema. There’s psychological horror and sci-fi blended together in one here, all of which works well together.
Dubau’s film reminds me of a J.G. Ballard story. Mercury is a tale of Gothic technology; scientific developments are bringing back the ghosts of the past. The protagonist’s trauma resurfaces due to technological advance, but at the end he’s let out into the world, left with all the dug up memories. Progress is great, sure. What expense is worth progress, though? Are human beings and their emotions, their psychological well-being, just an expense in the name of progress? These are some questions that Mercury begs of us.
Rejoice in the Lamb (2023)
Directed & Written by Courtney Bush / Will Carington / Jake Goicoechea
Starring Courtney Bush, Jane Stiles, Michelle Uranowitz, & Payton Barronian.
18 minutes
★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Rejoice in the Lamb follows V.H. (Courtney Bush; also one of the short’s co-directors/writers) as she tries to find out what’s happened to her best friend and roommate Katie (Jane Stiles), after the latter recently met a new friend called Sofia (Michelle Uranowitz). V.H. is sceptical about Sofia, who just doesn’t seem right. She says that Sofia’s touch even feels strange, like a jolt of electricity. Something is clearly not right. V.H. comes upon The Oracle (Payton Barronian) and tells them all about her troublesome tale. She thinks that, perhaps, Sofia is actually a vampire, and worries that something bad’s happened to Katie. Could that really be true? In this day and age, anything’s possible.
Rejoice in the Lamb has a bit of extra fat that could’ve been cut off. While I love the person who plays The Oracle, it’s an unnecessary bit of storytelling that never adds anything to the overall short. Other than that, everything else is pretty fantastic. Vampire lore in film and television has gotten stale for the most part. We’re retreading a lot of the same ground as others have tread before. This short offers up some of the same tropes we expect from vampire films, however, it extends a classic story like Bram Stoker’s Dracula into a contemporary space. Bush’s character V.H. is obviously a reference to Van Helsing, and even the style in which the short is presented with V.H. narrating and little bits of text popping up onscreen is reminiscent of Stoker’s epistolary style in the text of Dracula. Not everything has to be reinvented in the horror genre; sometimes a bit of a twist, or a clever use of old texts is enough to satisfy many genre lovers. Rejoice in the Lamb ushers classic Gothic into today’s world of messy friendships and awkward situations with fangs full of wit.
Beneath Cracked Pavement (2023)
Directed & Written by Marcus Fahey
Starring Emily Van Raay, Darnell Hutchins, John Calvin Kelly, Patrick Elizalde, Matt Moxam, & Ada Eminette Prado-Perez.
15 minutes
★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Marcus Fahey’s Beneath Cracked Pavement focuses on a trio of young guys looking to make a few dollars selling candy door-to-door right as they accidentally stumble onto a weird married couple who’ve just killed the lady cleaning their house. The boys get taken hostage and brought to the basement, where they all assume they’re eventually going to meet a grisly fate.
Difficult topics like racism don’t always have to be tackled with stone-cold seriousness, even though racism is a deeply serious subject. Beneath Cracked Pavement has a bit of fun with racism, only in the sense that it pokes a lot of fun at clueless white people who, intended or not, perpetuate so much racist nonsense. The couple in this short are typical white liberals. The dark hilarity of Fahey’s film is that the white couple are more concerned with the appearance of being racist than they are with the fact they’ve a) just killed someone and b) have taken a trio of young people hostage and c) that both of these crimes are, on some level, due to their racism. The white lady gives a speech about progress and references “uncharted land . . . untapped pastures . . . the vermin . . . the pests,” as she lectures about what is essentially gentrification—how she describes it perfectly represents gentrification ast the contemporary face of colonialism. A great moment comes when the lady rants at the boys and asks why they don’t “want to see Brooklyn become beautiful,” and one of the Black kids replies: “Brooklyn is already beautiful.” Everything in Beneath Cracked Pavement is so well done, from the pacing to the dialogue, right up to the scene as the credits start rolling which features the previously assumed murdered house cleaner that saves the day then has to catch the bus home like any other workday. All around a brilliant short.
All Your Women Things (2023)
Directed & Written by Madison Bloom
Starring Amelia Dudley & Stasia Bonni
13 minutes
★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Madison Bloom’s All Your Women Things is a brilliant, economic short horror about a designer and a model working on garments. The designer goes about taking measurements after the model tries on new lingerie. The designer eventually reveals more about themselves and what’s beneath their clothes. Is she getting gruesome inspiration from herself? Or, is her body the result of cruel alterations demanded by the male gaze that has ruled the fashion industry since time immemorial?
The horrifying beauty of a short film like All Your Women Things is that we can read it in a number of ways, even if Bloom had one sole intended meaning. The designer’s personal bodily horror can be taken devilishly as a metaphor of what we, as a society, inflict upon the individual bodies of women; her fashion-altered skin is a dark mirror’s reflection of the lingerie the model wears in the first part of the film. The body horror can also be read as one woman’s desperation to have her body reflected in fashion. So many women don’t see themselves in the world, in so many different ways, and this is perhaps the bloody plight of the designer. Or, we could even read the designer’s horrific bodily experience as one purely about obsession and the lengths to which some will go to make the perfect art, to realise their vision in the flesh, whatever their art form. All Your Women Things is succinct and smart and nasty beautiful.
Florence in Customer Care (2023)
Directed by Jordan Sommerlad & Cory Stonebrook
Screenplay by Cory Stonebrook
Starring Tiffany Trainer, Cory Stonebrook, Lizzy Miller, Subhash Mandal, & Michael Stiggers.
14 minutes
★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Jordan Sommerlad and Cory Stonebrook’s Florence in Customer Care depicts the soul-draining days of the eponymous Florence (Tiffany Trainer). She works in a call centre environment where she has to be constantly berated by irate customers. She deals with a boss who only sees her as a box to tick off on a spreadsheet. Her co-workers are generally mindless. She also has some kind of rash going on that spreads from her thigh to the rest of her body, creeping up to her neck. All she can do is dream of the day when she’ll be able to take time off and go on vacation, imagining herself strolling into the ocean off the beach. That’s if she can last through the daily grind; if it doesn’t grind her into a bloody pulp.
Florence in Customer Care is an Italian-inspired psychological horror straight from the depths of the working class. Florence starts to see the futility of working class life, first emblazoned on a subway wall in graffiti reading THIS PLACE WILL KILL US ALL. She later prints “This place will kill us all” on endless Sticky Notes that she places around her entire cubicle until there’s nothing but a sea of yellow and Sharpie surrounding her. Florence starts yelling at customers and not caring about doing her job correctly. She screams to one lady on the phone that “nobody gives a shit about your fucking credenza.” At the end, she makes it to the beach and the ocean, though it’s not her dream destination, and she barely makes it in one piece. Florence in Customer Care is a harrowing psychological horror film that doesn’t have to end in a typical murder spree, or a traumatic suicide for Florence, but rather ends on what adds up to a broken dream: the shattered hopes of working class people, the cruel reality that we only get a vacation when our mental health totally breaks down and demands, one way or another, that we take time off, or else something far worse might happen than just a bit of screaming and a nasty rash. A sad and wonderful short.
Father Son Holy Gore 