Festival Dispatch #9: Musings on Meaning 🌱
Part 1 of our HollyShorts Film Festival coverage
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Surprise! It’s been a while, but we couldn’t pass up this opportunity to stretch our legs a bit. For the first time, Cate covered the Oscar-qualifying HollyShorts Film Festival. It’s a festival for — you guessed it — short films. Now that it’s over, we’re rolling out our coverage of some of the best shorts she screened. Issues will be published over the coming week. Shorts often get ignored as the significant cultural contributions that they are, but there are always gems, and we’ve reviewed some here. Enjoy!
Deal of a Lifetime
written and directed by Lev Pakman
Deal of a Lifetime is a delightfully quirky little film. Starring David Cross as Roland, it follows his quest to find an affordable burial option for his parents’ eventual demise. After striking out at every funeral home within a 20-mile radius (the cheapest packages are $25K), he heads home, distraught that he cannot afford what he thinks his parents deserve. But then his teenage son suggests a DIY burial. There are build-your-own-coffin kits on Etsy! So they order and build one.
Cross’s neurotic energy brings a kind of ironic archness to the proceedings, and it’s interesting watching him noodle over a problem he is not yet facing. Connor Ausman as his son Bo acts as comic relief, his Lanthimosian dialogue adding a noticeable kind to the sullenness of the atmosphere. The color grading too echoes Roland’s dismay, all muted tones and grainy scenes that play on his growing despair.
But it is Cross who really brings the whole thing together. When he confesses to his parents that he cannot afford a burial, they tell him they’d never expect him to shell out $50K. They want a home burial, to be closer to him. You can order the coffin kits online! The flash of shock, relief then muted joy that flashes over his face is worth the price of admission alone. He easily accesses the kind of gnawing anxiety that comes as one’s parents age. After all, soon, it will be up to you to be the adult in the room. And you’re not always quite ready to take off the training wheels.
Concrete
written and directed by Eli Vidis Newman
It’s hard to say what to make of this little film. A dreamy, trippy sci-fi story, Concrete follows one man who discovers that his reality is not, in fact, real. Here, every citizen must wear a “cranial static pineal mount.” A government-mandated circular stem no bigger than a button adorns the foreheads of everyone we meet. We are told that to remove it would risk “pineal combustion.” Basically, their heads will explode.
It’s a fascinating premise for a story, but of course, the logline itself gives away the coming twists and turns. While trying to find someone to repair his mother’s wheelchair, our hero instead encounters a young woman with a bandage around her head. Manic and determined, she accosts him with a sedative, then takes his pineal mount out by force. His head does not explode.
Instead, his reality begins to shift — here and not here, real and not real. Soon, he finds he cannot keep hold of or process his rational experience. So he visits an older homeless man (Ed Harris) who helps him to replace the mount. But not before explaining that the mounts were instituted as a means of population control. The world had stopped being able to reach consensus. And that made the masses dangerous.
It’s an easy comparison to invoke The Matrix here, especially when some scenes directly imply the existence of some kind of simulation. But the premise isn’t stretched far enough. While our hero does find his way to a voluntary removal of his implant by the film’s end, we don’t get to see much of his internal change. Sure he’s chosen to stay in reality. But why? What has he gained? What has he lost?
At 15 minutes long, I don’t expect an epic sci-fi film. But here, an excellent idea feels undercooked and underdeveloped, to the detriment of the exciting ideas bubbling under the surface.
The Dog
written and directed by Danielle Baynes
(trigger warning: severe suicidal ideation)
Kate Walsh may be best known as the great Addison Montgomery-Shepherd (of Grey’s Anatomy fame). But in The Dog, she gives a performance altogether more daring and substantial than her most well-known onscreen counterpart. That is not to say her previous work did not brook such accolades. But in this deeply melancholic short, she displays the full extent of her artistic range in ways that inspire relent, and relief.
An experienced veterinarian, Claire (Walsh) spends her days watching people mourn as she gently puts down their beloved pets. Snot-nosed and teary-eyed, her clients openly grieve as their companions slowly drift away. But over the course of this one lonely night, the excessive death is taxing on Claire, who is alone, and isolated from the people she loves — a text from her sister goes unanswered yet again. Over and over we see Claire washing her hands after one of these procedures, emotionally removing the blood on her hands. But those hands shake. And they can’t take much more of this. At the end of one work day, she takes one of the syringes containing the chemicals she uses on the animals, and packs up to go home.
And then comes the dog. And he asks her to kill him.
At first bewildered, Claire tries to talk the dog out of it. She has to do an examination and determine if the procedure is necessary based on a series of factors she tells him. But approaching her — calm and comforting — he repeats the request.
“We’re in pain.”
That’s all it takes to change Claire’s mind. She lays next to the dog on the clinic floor and waits to die.
Much of the film is focused on Walsh’s face — and for good reason. Claire’s pain is palpable in every ripple of her brow; every deep exhale. The screen nearly vibrates off its axis each time she stares into the bathroom mirror, willing herself to get it together. Her red eyes telegraph sorrow, but also determination. Tight shots convey the claustrophobic nature of her malaise. She can’t escape it.
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