Heap
Directed by Kyle Marchen
Screenplay by Ben O’Neil
Starring Louisa Zhu, Scott McCulloch, Kendall Wright, & Percy Anane-Dwumfour

Comedy / Horror

★★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

Kyle Marchen’s Heap, written by Ben O’Neil, is a perfectly disturbed snapshot of urban life in 2024, as one woman (Louisa Zhu) struggles to find a better place within the rigid hierarchy of the rental economy. She wishes she lived in a better building, one with friendly, inviting neighbours and a proper compost bin. Instead, she lives in an apartment that reeks of compost and she can’t seem to do much living except when she has to time her visits to the adjacent building’s compost bin so nobody catches her dumping her scraps where she shouldn’t be dumping them. And, eventually, it’s all too much for her to handle.

Heap is absurdism for the working class, wrapped up in a great little horror-comedy package. These kinds of horror stories are right at home in 2024 while most of us are struggling to pay rent and bills and buy groceries, many of us settling for the ‘best’ place we can afford, a lot of us dreaming of something bigger and better, yet at what cost? The protagonist captures the working class wanting to catch a goddamn break: “I wanna be lucky, too.” Marchen’s short expresses a lot of frustration and also the yearning for a better world in an endearing way because “with compost, there‘s hope, right?”

Locksmith
Directed & Written by Corey Benson Powers
Starring Pete Berwick & Paige Bourne

Horror

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

A lot of times short films can be endlessly interesting because of their themes, the kind that resonate long after the credits roll, and then, in short films like Corey Benson Powers’s Locksmith, what endures most is the palpable feeling it leaves you with; in this case, pure terror. The story is a simple, quick, and effective one: a young woman greets a locksmith who’s there to fix her back door and she starts to suspect he’s being a bit more than a creep, but she suspects the wrong person entirely.

Locksmith isn’t void of theme, either. The young woman’s fears, on the surface, are very well founded because men are creepy, and when you live in a big city you inevitably have to, occasionally, let some of these creeps into your home to fix things, et cetera. This is something most women can relate to well. Then, at the same time, the young woman’s suspicions are cast in the wrong direction which spell abject horror for her in the end, and it’s all about the final few moments in Locksmith, as we begin to see how awful things are about to get before Powers cuts to black. There’s more power in us not seeing any of the actual violence that’s sure to come than if Powers chose to close the short with a burst of blood and gore. The terror the young woman experiences while the truth of her situation dawns on her is enough to sear Locksmith into your brain meat.