We’ve all had that feeling at one time or another. On a dark night or in the middle of the day, alone or in a crowded place…the feeling of something just out of reach over our shoulders and at the corners of our eyes, lingering at the edges to grab us when we least expect it. As children we labeled it the monster under the bed, but in truth it goes far beyond that. It’s the unnamable, untamable, unpredictable threat we can taste in the backs of our throats but can never fully prepare for. Final Girls Berlin Film Fest’s approach to “Menacing Presences” rounds out the short films with an array of things that go bump in the night, uncanny valleys, and environmental terrors to leave you haunted.
We open the Menacing Presences block with writer-director Annalise Lockhart’s “Inheritance”, in which a woman begins to see specters lingering outside her father’s house on the night of her birthday, learns about a family secret long kept hidden, and must find a way to protect herself and her family when the ghouls she sees begin to get too close for comfort. It’s a strange tale of threat and safety, where reality and the fantastic blend into indistinguishability. When Norra (Victoria A. Villier) discovers that her father and brother have seen the spirits that are just beginning to plague her she begins to wonder not only what it all means but how dangerous they really are. How far will they need to go to protect themselves from things that seem to tread the line between living and dead, corporeal and elusive? Her brother’s creative scientific thinking turns the concept of “ghost stories” on its head and makes for an unorthodox and somewhat uneasy tone to the whole tale, a strange and endearing question of hauntings, houses, and survival.
There’s no more menacing presence in American consciousness than that of the corporation. But what if that all-powerful specter of adulthood intersected with the childhood fear of things that go bump in the night? Writer-director Kyle Dunbar’s “Housekreeping” attempts to ask just that in this short about a housekeeper (Rebecca Callender) going about her rounds in a room where she is less alone than she thinks. When a creature (Ariana Marquis) pops up to seal her fate, she is thrown into a bureaucracy unlike any humanity has ever seen. It is perhaps the lightest and somewhat strangest of the shorts on offer here, less interested in unease and more in coating horror with a humorous sheen.
One of my greatest fears is getting lost in an otherwise familiar place. One wrong turn along a familiar path and suddenly it’s as if you’ve been tossed into a whole other world. Writer-director Sophie Littman’s “Sudden Light” explores this very fear when Mia (Esme Creed-Miles) and her sister Squeeze (Millie Ashford) get lost in the fields near their house while walking their dog. Only, they followed the same path as always. It’s the woods that are shifting in tandem with their troubled minds as they discuss their father’s failing health and stay at the hospital and what unknown hopes and anxieties the future holds. It’s the cinematic equivalent of getting wrapped up in and fixated on an anxious thought while stressed, when that thought is the only thing you can think and every step feels like a circle. For having truly menacing undertones from beginning to end, “Sudden Light” is my choice for standout of the Menacing Presences block.
Closing out the Menacing Presences, and the short film fest as a whole, is “Nuage (Cloud)” written by Jean-Jacques Kahn and directed by Joséphine Darcy Hopkins. Just in case “Sudden Light” didn’t pile on enough unease for you, this story of two young girls, Eugénie (Cypriane Gardin) and Capucine (Solène Rigot) on the run from an ash cloud that is making its way to swallow up their city, ought to do the trick. At once expansive and claustrophobic, “Cloud” goes all in on the anxiety of choices, life and death decisions, and what grasping for moments of freedom in the midst of all-consuming fear looks like. For my money it sits right at home with the likes of MELANCHOLIA in tone, willing and eager to smother you in its sense of impending and unstoppable demise even as you fight against it to find a source of light. It’s an uneasy but powerful end to a festival that continues to dive deeper into plumbing the depths of fresh creative talent from women and non-binary creators alike who need space to tell their beautiful, joyous, uncomfortable, confrontational stories in a world that is still only just beginning to realize the power of their voices.
Tags: Annalise Lockhart, Ariana Marquis, Cloud, Cypriane Gardin, Esme Creed-Miles, Film Festivals, Final Girls Berlin, Final Girls Berlin Film Festival, Housekreeping, Inheritance, Jean-Jacques Kahn, Josephine Darcy Hopkins, Kyle Dunbar, Menacing Presences, Millie Ashford, Rebecca Callender, Short Film, shorts, Solene Rigot, Sophie Littman, Sudden Light
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