What
is more frightening, taking responsibility for your life or seeing a ghost?
Louise may jolly well have to face both prospects during her detox time in an
isolated seaside cottage. Alas, it might be too isolated for her own good in Jo
Lewis’s short film Whisper (trailer here), which screens
during the 2017 Final Girls Berlin Women in Horror Film Festival (program here).
Louise
looks presentable, but she has been battling addiction for years. Sick of
herself, she has come to this solitary bungalow to quit cold turkey. She does
not think much of the mysterious figure we spy in the distance because she is
wrapped up in her own crisis. Unfortunately,
she was characteristically irresponsible in her preparations for her
self-sequestering—and that shadowy presence is still out there.
Whisper is not quite
eleven minutes, but it has some genuinely frightening moments. Lewis skillfully
relies on setting and ambiance to creep out viewers, rather than resorting to
cheap tricks. There is a great deal of ambiguity to the film that could well
prove divisive with audiences, but it should not detract from a terrific accomplishment
in genre mise en scene.
Cinematographer Mike Lloyd really helps
establish the film’s eerie elegance, while Imogen Doel gives a fully developed,
multi-dimensional performance as Louise. Impressively cinematic and successful
by supernatural horror genre standards, Whisper
screens this coming Sunday (6/11) as part of Shorts Program 8: Escape, along with Jacqueline Castel’s wickedly
cool Puppet Man and Olga Osorio’s
mostly clever ReStart, at the Final
Girls Berlin Film Festival.
