Breakfast in Bed is a short thriller about a man who falls for woman and kidnaps her when she won’t be his.
Stories of obsession have long dotted the Hollywood landscape, with unstable men longing for and acting upon women they can’t have, tragically mistaking their genuine – if not misaligned – feelings as reciprocal. With Cameron A Mitchell‘s latest short film Breakfast in Bed, we enter into a darkness that sets up plenty we’ve seen before, with a solid twist in the narrative that works a lot in its favor, even as a few bumps in the road leave this a disturbing if uneven effort.
Natalie (Megan Hensley) has been friends with Noah (Daniel R. Murphy) since they were in grade school, their uneasy relationship clearly not quite what the other thinks it is. She has always trusted him but left him firmly entrenched in the ‘friend zone’, even as she’s revealed what appears at least to him, as a number of sexual and personal revelations that seem like invitation. Noah has stood on the sidelines for long enough though, and when he sees her out with a guy he naturally feels is all wrong for her, well, he goes to extremes.
The story is told in reverse, each about three minutes long in this twelve-minute short and it’s this little tricky storytelling device that is the most engaging angle in all this, the film itself otherwise limited by its budget. While it begins in the present, leaving us already somewhat aware where it’s heading, it then works back to a choice made by Noah that he initially feels is right but will come to learn might not be.
Hensley, who got her start back in 2010 in a minor role in Breck Eisner‘s controversial and influential The Crazies, has been very busy since and is very convincing as a young woman in a desperate and deadly fight for her life. When we meet her in the story, the worst has already happened, and as we step back in time, we are only witness to the aftermath of unseen violence, the story centering on conversations, some uncomfortably light and others aggressive and accusatory.
The distressing themes are of course timely, and Mitchell, who wrote the screenplay, works this like a staged play, a mostly single-setting story that revolves around motivations both in keeping Natalie where she is and in getting herself free. I liked most the dialogue, the exchanges between these longtime friends now turned enemies sharp and effective. We learn a lot in a very short time. There is a rawness to the movie though that leaves it a bit unpolished, and while in some sense it has a kind of found footage feel to it, in another, it lacks a larger punch.
Breakfast in Bed is a solid entry in the short film format, with two believable characters and excellent writing. While it’s an old story it doesn’t lessen the need to keep it in attention. Worth a look if you get the chance.