A review of Three dark short films about loss and sorrow from two talented filmmakers.
To Be Alone
Director: Mathew Mahler
RUNTIME: 12 Minutes
Actor Timothy J. Cox needs not a single word of dialogue to say more than most would with a script a hundred pages long. As William, he sits in front of his kitchen-bound television snacking on crackers and cereal, his hair in place and his clothes neatly pressed. On the TV, an unseen voice echoes in the room about the providence of God and faith, while on the score, an eerie ping of piano notes ominously foretells something unsettling. What is on William’s mind?
Well, let’s just say, there’s a secret upstairs and poor William is having a bit of a personal crisis, the phone answering machine breaking the silence as the local sheriff calls in concern. Why has he and his wife not come to church?
Written by Mahler, the story is heavily focused on religion, at least what it means to be so for a man spinning in doubt, for reasons that become obvious when we head to the master bedroom. Mahler uses striking visuals to spin this tale, the film almost entirely without words, allowing viewers to connect how they wish to the troubling outcome and the implied end.
To Be Alone is a well-made and well-acted film that is curiously sentimental while it conjures a few obvious questions for conversation.
Here Lies Joe
Director: Mark Battle
RUNTIME: 23 Minutes
Suicide darkly colors the heart of director Mark Battle‘s deeply troubling little film about a guy named Joe (Dean Temple) who starts his story in the front seat of his sealed car, running a pipe from exhaust to passenger window. It’s a tough image to take in that then flashbacks to earlier that day when Joe sits in on a suicide group therapy session, meeting young and hardscrabble fellow participant ‘Z’ (Andi Morrow). She’s not what he expects.
She seems to make a mockery of the the process, but Joe makes a connection and she pulls him from the session and leads him on a short adventure through a cemetery of all places where he sort of has an epiphany. However, is her upbeat, magnetic personality for real or only a show?
Purposefully heavy and intentionally sorrowful, what’s sort of interesting about Battle’s script is how inspiring it eventually becomes, even when it leads us to a harrowing moments near the end that is simple heartbreaking to watch. Extremely well-acted (with Cox from above making an appearance), this tender, genuinely human story is more than what it seems. This could be the groundwork for a substantial full length feature.
What Jack Built
Director: Mathew Mahler
RUNTIME: 11 Minutes
Timothy J. Cox once again doesn’t have anything to say, but sure does know how to get his point across. This time he plays the titular Jack, tinkering madly in his basement in 1985 like a crazed scientist in an old 1950s B movie sci-fi film, complete with googles. Like the classic Tom Waits songs asks, “What’s he building in there?”
He eventually gets above ground and things don’t get all the much clearer, but it’s pretty amazing how interested we get in trying to figure out what the heck’s he’s doing. Mahler, who wrote the story and the ethereal score haunting every frame of the film, ramps up the momentum as Jack feverishly assembles his complex contraption, leaving us constantly wondering how any of it has any purpose, even as some familiarity to it begins to take shape. However, just because that happens, there’s absolutely no way you’ll know where this is actually going. Because you won’t.
Perhaps metaphorical, maybe even symbolic, this is a weirdly engaging bit of sci-fi madness with an ending that is all interpretation. Is the hunter trying to trap inspiration or is it an obsession that can’t be caged? Or is it more concrete than even that? You be the judge. Either way, it’s a trippy little journey that is wildly entertaining simple for the questions it leaves unanswered.