Film review - Draft (not finished)

Imagine if you had the chance to save someone you despise - would you?

 A new trio of directors give a new perspective on life and death from a concept that has been explored in the cinema before. The directors: Ella Blunden, Alea Holland and Rebekah Smith who also star in this short film created an idea of focusing on a girl who gains abnormal abilities to see how long people have left to live, represented by timers that rest above their heads. The fact that these timers exist in the eyes of the protagonist, played by Ella Blunden, seems to be the main focus of the film as it is presented as a silent movie with no dialogue to be heard so the visuals are what draws the audience in. However the main focus is the plot point towards the end of the narrative. The protagonist is presented with a situation to save the bully from their impending fate but an open ending doesn’t confirm if their fate has actually been sealed or not. This concept is one of the stronger features of this short film as it is visually interesting and the idea of playing around with time does put a lot towards the overall appeal of the film as the rest of the components consist of a slow character driven narrative and the camera work used is quite simple but nevertheless effective.

One of the main criticisms that stand against this film, apart from a slightly incoherent narrative, is the suicide scene. The problem does not lie in the whole idea of seeing a person take their own life as people may suspect, merely that the effects used are felt not to be realistic but with a low budget film with limited equipment, jumping from a multi-storey car park without causing any harm to your actors in a realistic way is something that is very difficult to achieve. Nevertheless it still provides a shocking moment in the narrative and the effects provided for the timers in the majority of shots are done extremely well.

The film at first watch without any background knowledge can prove confusing to the audience so it is something that may need to be watched again on a separate occasion, it needs more contextualisation to be understandable. It is clear that the subject of the film is inspired by other media such as Nickleback's 'Savin' Me' and does possess some similar themes to another short film that was released on Virgin Media shorts a little while before this but its execution is done in a more different and though provoking manner. In short it is a solid a concept that grabs you from minute one and never lets you go, even if one of the main reasons for staying focused is having to rack your brains to figure out the overall plot, however it does still provide a level of enjoyment.