It
is nice to know wherever you go in the world, you can still find vicious psycho
killers and ragingly dysfunctional families—the two often go together hand in
hand. Once again, the short programmers indulge our appetite for the chaotic
and speculative when a new block of genre short films plays during the 55th New York Film Festival.
Frankly,
the family in Natalie Erika James’ short film Creswick (trailer
here)
seems to be healthy and well-adjusted, but their furniture is sinister. Sam
never felt comfortable in her father Colin’s cabin-workshop-home, but she never
really understood why. Nevertheless, she is somewhat sad to return as a grown
adult to help him close-up and move out of the property. However, he finally
realizes what unsettled her as a child. Rugged old Colin is convinced there is
another entity haunting the space.
Although
only ten minutes long, Creswick is a
terrific example of economical and evocative story telling. Thanks to the smart
disciplined performances of Dana Miltins and Chris Orchard, the audience
quickly picks up on the loving but somewhat strained nature of their
relationship. It is also cool whenever a horror film credits a furniture
designer—in this case Isabel Avendano.
The
family in Angelita Mendoza’s The Last
Light also love their children. Unfortunately, they are already down one
cousin, who presumably fell victim to the budding ten-year-old serial killer
they have tied up in the barn. Sadly, it seems tragedy is likely to compound when
another young girl sneaks off, hoping to cultivate a friendship with the boy.
Even though we suspect we know exactly where it is headed that sense of
inevitability makes it palpably intense.
We
next shift gears from the arid, windswept Mexican desert to a deliciously lurid
Italian clinic. You might uncharitably accuse Alberto Viavattene’s Birthday of favoring style over
substance, but what rich giallo style it is. A morally flexible nurse is
assigned to help a rich old patient celebrate her 100th birthday.
The nurse isn’t exactly Willard Scott, but that’s okay, the patient isn’t
exactly Jessica Tandy. Birthday might
be a bit more fantastical than classic giallos, but Sandro De Frino’s
cinematography and Enrico Ascoli’s score or totally in the patent leather
glove.
Gabriel
de Orioste’s Program is probably the
slightest film in the block addressing themes more fully explored in Guy-Roger
Duvert’s feature Virtual Revolution and
Grace Rowe’s short The Sweetening:
digital love as a means of escape in trying times. Juan Pablo Arias Muñoz’s Hombre also treads a familiar path,
forcing us to watch a sensitive adolescent struggle through a hunting trip with
his judgmental father, while suspecting something unnatural is out there in the
woods.
In
a surprise rebound, the genre program closes with one of the strongest shorts, Hitchhiker from Damien Power, whose brutal
and somewhat pedestrian Killing Ground we
did not dig at Sundance. As an homage to hitchhiking horror and noir, Power
cut-and-pastes his dialogue from films like The
Hitcher and Detour, yet it never
sounds like it is trying to do something cute. In the rather macabre tradition
of Rabid Dogs, a violent but somewhat
immature fugitive crosses paths with a no-fooling-around psycho hitchhiker.
Hilarity does not ensue, but there are some lean cuts of morbid humor and man
oh man, is Julian Garner ever something as the titular hitchhiker.
Cheers
to Australia for starting and ending the program on high notes. Special thanks
should also go out to Italy for inventing and constantly reinventing the
giallo. The combined merits of Creswick,
Hitchhiker, Birthday, and Last Light are
more than sufficient to recommend Shorts Program
2: Genre Stories when it screens this Saturday (9/30) and Monday (10/2), as
part of the 2017 New York Film Festival.
