Having watched one of Christopher Cox's earlier shorts I decided to jump forward to his latest effort, last years "The Noise Next Door". In every way possible, this is a much better film.
Having moved into his new apartment, Jay (James Sanger) begins to hear noises of a woman in distress coming from next door. He knocks and meets Ethan (Scott Bolger) and his wife Morgan (Natalie Polisson). Though they both claim that they are fine, there's a bruise on Morgan's arm that continues to raise an alarm with Jay, so he reports the situation to building management. He later sees Morgan, hunched in her door way crying through his apartment spyhole, but when he opens the door, she has gone.
As with "Don't Look Away" this perhaps isn't the most original story ever told in the realm of horror short films, but it is carried off with much more panache and style this time. It helps that the performances are better - it almost all rest on James Sanger to carry this off and he does well. I believe his fear, or anger. Scott Bolger too keeps his character on the right side of suspicious in the earlier scenes and I too believed his growing frustrations at Ethan's unwarranted, from his point of view, prying into his life.
The horror element towards the end is well done. Be it visual effects on the character of the foley work of them moving about. There is a memorable flashback reveal and there are some moments of genuine tension in those final scenes ahead of a nice jump scare ending.
Christopher Cox has a lively Youtube page with lots of information about the shorts he's made and, based on the improvements I've seen in just these two shorts, I look forward to see what the future holds.
