The good folks behind Oklahoma City’s 19th annual deadCenter Film Festival know how to curate a stellar round-up of short films, and their “After Dark” collection this year was no exception, offering up nine films that embrace the strange, the surreal, and the subversive.
The line-up kicked off with We Are Terrible, from writer/director John MacDonald, an offbeat comedy about four women gathering at a posh California house for a pool party. They dance, cook, bicker, bolster each other, and take turns torturing a very bad man. The film had some fine moments, but at just under seven minutes, it didn’t afford any opportunities to really get to know these characters. The unanswered questions were intentional—for instance, are these women hired killers or out for personal revenge? And while some mysteries surrounding the premise are fine, a little more time spent with them would have been nice.
You’ll Only Have Each Other, the first of several horror movies in the block, came next. Either shot on 35mm film or digitally processed to look that way, Allison-Eve Hammersley’s short both looks and feels like a gothic chiller from the 70s. The ghost of the film could be real or imagined, but either way, its presence has a serious and possibly harmful psychological effect on the protagonist, deftly played by Amelia Rose Blaire.
Perhaps the darkest of the After Dark Shorts screened next, Marco Jemolo’s Framed, a stop-motion nightmare that combined the aesthetics of Wallace & Gromit with the nightmare-infused work of the Quay Brothers and Jan Švankmajer, with a plot that would make playwright Luigi Pirandello proud. It’s best not to know too much about Framed before going into it, and I highly recommend seeking it out.
More horrors followed. Simon Werdmüller von Elgg’s Lemons is another vengeance tale, though nowhere near as comical as We Are Terrible, featuring two truly disturbing and unstable characters clashing on a rainy afternoon. Water plays a big, albeit deliciously confounding, role in Other Side Of The Box, a film from director Caleb Phillips, who co-wrote the script with star Nick Tag. The imagery here is deeply unsettling, and the plot is what-the-fuckery at its finest.
Weirdness was also aplenty in Who You Are, a trio of interconnected shorts from director Joel Jay Blacker and screenwriter Samual Roots, who were both in attendance, alongside actor Skinner Meyers. The films play out as a commercial and two instructional videos for a device called the Mundi Machine, a retrofitted 80s Macintosh that can read your soul. Problem is, Mundi is also sentient, extremely rude, and very eager to hook into the internet. Equal parts Cronenberg and Adult Swim, Who You Are has two more installments coming out soon, with the possibility of a longer series in the future.
Two animated films appeared in the block: Diego Porral Soldevilla’s one minute-long Monsters Walking, which is a more or less a visual joke (with an all-too-real and painful punchline), and Geoff Marslett’s The Phantom 52, a stream-of-conscious journey along a lonely night road, with a trucker (voiced by veteran actor Tom Skerritt) desperately calling out for company on his CB. A country-singing rattlesnake and semi truck-whale hybrids also make an appearance.
Last but not least, one of the collection’s most boisterous and infectious films was Lexical Gap, a feminist punk rock musical short about virginity, sexuality, and identity. Playing out like an extended music video, the film features a fictitious band performing three songs at a concert, all of which interconnect and tell the story of the lead singer’s journey to define and redefine herself. The film made its world premiere at deadCenter, but if you missed it, not to worry: Lexical Gap is available to view at writer-director Yoko Okumura’s website.
Be on the lookout for every one of the films mentioned here. They’re all definitely worth seeking out.
