Wet and Dry

This is a wonderful short that should be commended more for its ambition than its execution. In an age when most shorts are an excuse for dismal slices of life, or jokey anecdotes, here is a film that dares to be outlandish and fantastic; to address profound themes of death, old age and decay; to mismatch styles for meaning, not effect; and , most importantly, to do all this within the comic form.

The film opens and closes with shots of normal, conformist, modern Britain, the one suburban, the other industrial. This could be a film about the state of the nation, but it also concerns the mind. Its centrepiece is an Usher-like mansion, decaying, dusty, dank, dark, laden with assorted bric-a-brac, pre-eminently Egyptian.

Our heroine is a mummy, possibly of an Egyptian princess or goddess (one of the film's tests is the reliability of her flashbacks), who in former times was executed for, I think, sacrilegous adultery (her lover ran off: there is an understated, powerful feminism in the film), and is now condemned to dusting this old house, which, like her and her mind, is falling apart (sounds like a 50s melodrama). After centuries, however, it seems that she might be about to die - she seeps sand in tandem with her hourglass. All attempts to keep alive founder, until a flyer appears for a famous plastic surgeon...

The film boasts some wicked satire on the sterility of our (bourgeois) obsession to become immortal (especially when it's just to stay the same), and the greed and mendacity of those who encourage it; but the film is mostly a melancholy portrait of an obsolete Britain, suckling its old glories, which were always plundered from someone else (one of the first shots is a photograph of a hoary Victorian, presumably an Egyptologist. Is he the 'mummy''s father? The film is, literally, a can of worms).

Or maybe it's about the crippling effects of trying to escape conformity, to live the life of the imagination. In this light, the final scene is quite moving. The film is so rich in detail, that these scarcely thought through reflections can hardly be taken seriously.

What is certain is that McKay has a startling eye, an understanding of the quietly supernatural and the power of artifice, and a sense of form, more reminiscent of Michael Powell in its unembarrassed audacity than the ossified naturalism more usually favoured by British filmmakers. He used to be a stand-up, and this is most evident in his affection for the cinematic potential of theatrical debris; his feeling for the unhappy transience of performance; in the sketch-like shifts of tone and scene. The mummy herself is adorably sweet, avoiding Gormenghastian portentousness, her sad eyes marked with pain, yet eternally hopeful, and just a little bit mischievous.