Evil Dead inspired Japanese short horror film. A bunch of pals go to check in on their friend who seems to be going full hikikomori. When they get there, the windows are covered with newspaper, the place stinks, there’s goo on the carpet, and bags of garbage everywhere. Because it isn’t Scotland, where the immediate reaction would be, “Your place is bowfin’. Get off your arse and gie the place a wipe.”, they instead sit patiently waiting for a cup of tea.
But alas, they are not the only visitors to the home, and while it might have been easy to enter, leaving might prove more challenging. Fun classic style horror with its own touch of weird.
The Nicky Nack nails its colours to the mast as English folk horror by opening in the quintessential British pub replete with toby jugs and hanging baskets. There our hero throws back a few, and like Tam O’Shanter, prepares to make the long and lonesome journey home through the black night. Doing the starboard-side shuffle of the absolutely stotious, he makes his way down the lane, when he hears a furtive whisper, “Nicky-Nack!” Who or what is following him? Excellent short horror, both thumbs up!
Even the title gives you the wiggins. Such Small Hands is a horror short focusing on a newcomer to a orphanage who struggles to break into the collective. When they pull apart her doll, she institutes a secret nighttime game, where one girl at random will be picked to be ‘the doll’ and the rest will dress her up and tell her their secrets. An ominous sense of foreboding pervades the film, and you never feel sure when and where the lightning will strike.
The Dinner After is a horror short film about a lassie going for her weekly tea with her mum and dad. Their abject cheerfulness bounces off her hesitancy in what you could at first put down to the normal tension of adult children visiting their parents. However it soon proves that more is going on, as Angela’s sister Lauren is noticeably absent, and although it goes unmentioned, their father is constantly calling Angela by her name. What follows is a film with genuine scares, moments of “GAH!”, as well as a heartfelt portrait of trauma.
There’s nothing as dirty as money, as folk say. A waitress with a phobia about coins is really in the wrong job, in this German short horror film. The sound and music build to a crescendo as she starts to crack up with a customer who insists on paying in a slew of shrapnel. The physical manifestation of anxiety develops into body horror, as we see through her eyes this living nightmare.
In The Soil is a Danish short horror film. A daughter becomes concerned about her father after he becomes obsessed with digging a hole next to their house. From the size and shape of it, it’s clearly a grave. But for who?
Really lovely, interesting and warm short film about a group of laundry workers getting together a poster celebrating the festival of Ganesh.
Now, when I say poster, I don’t mean a bit of A4 stuck up in the break room. I mean something the size of a barn door. One guy uses last year’s poster to waterproof one side of his house. These are beasts, man. And in India, posters are a very big deal. Rajesh, the main character in the documentary, says, “Without a poster, you don’t exist!” A poster is engagement with the social, religious, and political life of the community.
It might seem a little ridiculous, viewed from Glasgow, this obsession with getting the biggest poster with the most stuff jammed on it. Especially when it looks like it’s made in MS Paint, and has low-res mobile photos of the folk on it. But the aesthetic does draw you in, as the camera passes rows of them celebrating a politician’s birthday, it does become hypnotic. It reminds me of nothing so much as the way people go on about their Christmas lights over here.
There is a comedy element of watching the guys at the laundry bicker over the layout of the poster, suggesting endless changes as they peer at the latest draft on the mobile phone. Can you darken my sunglasses? Can you make my bindi bigger? Can you turn down the contrast so my hair doesn’t look thin? This year Covid has hit, so they stick an image containing safety advice in the corner too.
This is what I like in a short documentary, a feeling like I got to be somewhere, listening to someone talk about what is important to them. There’s a warm bond of friendship between Rajesh and the other laundry workers, and it felt nice to meet them all. With the medical and financial difficulties Covid is bringing, it’s good to see them still find a way to carry on their part in the life of their community.
Pride is the name of the University of Virginia’s Black Student Alliance’s newspaper. The short film is set back in the 1990s and depicts the student group getting together to discuss what to put out in their latest issue.
The topic is financial aid is brought up, how it’s not enough, how difficult it is to apply for, how unhelpful the whole service is. The students laugh at the possibility of such an article putting their own funding in jeopardy, since they are so routinely ignored it’s unlikely anyone in authority will read it. The conversation, set 30 years ago, is as relevant as ever today.
You see the writer typing up the story on a typewriter, then the copies being printed off on a rotary press. It looks so antiquated now, it might as well have been chiselled tablets.
An interesting look at the long tradition of protest and citizen journalism that feeds into today’s world.
Marrying documentary and musical, Neon Phantom looks at the lives and struggles of delivery workers in Brazil.
The film combines a lot of different styles, there are scripted drama skits, first hand narratives of real experiences, song and dance numbers about their frustrations. It’s an interesting choice. It gives a number of different ways for the workers to express themselves, but that has to be balanced against making sure it’s not just a big jumble.
Like I just got done saying in my In My Network review, the gig economy has basically taken workers’ rights back to square one. With no sick pay, you effectively have people working through a plague, delivering food. Folk talk about having to work even when positive for Covid, because it’s that or starve.
Many people work hungry, because they can’t afford to delay their deliveries by stopping to eat. All day they’re out on a bike delivering food to folk at home, smelling their tea, while hungry.
And if you’re driving hungry and tired, there’s always the chance you’ll make a mistake or get in an accident. People feel like, if they were hit by a car tomorrow, only thing to happen would be folk would complain their meal is late.
But not only is there no imminent solution, it feels like it’s not even discussed as a problem. All the way through the pandemic, there’s been ribbons, signs, rounds of applause. But when it actually comes time to give workers paid sick leave, paid lunch hours and safety protections, SILENCE. As more and more people are being pushed out of employment, or having to pick up second jobs because of poverty wages, delivery workers are becoming more ubiquitous, but even dressed in neon biker’s shirts, they and their struggles remain invisible.
You’d think that musical and documentary wouldn’t fit, but what can you do when you hear all of that but scream out in song? An interesting way of presenting an overlooked issue.
Horrific animated short film from Chile, which makes more sense if you know who Ingrid Olderock was. Be warned there are some deeply disturbing images in this, all the worse now I know they are based on a true story.
Bestia starts by showing us the mundane life of a pudgy middle-aged woman. She bakes cakes, takes her dog for a walk, frets about her weight, the usual. Until a series of malevolent images begin to impinge on her world. She dreams of beheading her dog, sees faceless figures stalking her, and her stops to a high-gated home become more frequent.
The revolting truth is she is a member of Chile’s secret police, and she is taking her dog every day to a secret holding site to rape the tortured women imprisoned there. As I say, this is based on the real crimes of Ingrid Olderock, also known as The Woman of the Dogs. She was German-Chilean, her family had been Nazi sympathisers way back, and she worked to uphold the conservative military dictatorship of Pinochet.
You’ll be glad to know she was shot, but not as any punishment for her crimes. Like many absolute monsters, she escaped all criminal prosecution. She was shot in the head by a leftist, although she maintained it was a set-up by her own side, after she left the service. And unfortunately the bullet didn’t kill her, she lived right up until 2001.
Throughout Bestia, we see the main character slowly losing her mind. The knife on her kitchen table spins. In place of baked cakes, in her oven she sees a gun. She is haunted by the figures of her victims. It might be the only justice we get.
With no dialogue, Bestia still manages to be a gut punch of a film. Made me sick to my stomach.
