The brief description that attends this film would have you believe that it's about a Satanic ritual gone awry, but that's misleading.
Rather, it's a short film about trust and the bonds that can form between teenagers--teenagers motivated by irony and angst, or tethered by sincere obedience, with heads full of erroneous information and half-formed thoughts, trying to make sense of a broken world. It's a character study of adolescence in which one test of loyalty is, by chance, replaced with another. It's a film about bravery in the face of uncertainty. It's a film about faith--in a metaphysical sense, yes, but more importantly in a social sense, and how myth and ritual can bind us to each other in demonstrably material ways.
Most people will, like me, come to this short via the Criterion Channel, where it's a bit of an odd duck among that platform's general fare of arthouse films. A cursory scan of the credits and a brief Google search reveal that this was a college-level summer film project. The actors, all in their mid-teens at the time of filming, offer endearingly convincing performances; the writing, direction, cinematography, editing, and music are solid, and while the film can be a bit too clever for its own good at times, it's twenty-six minutes of time well spent for those with an interest in independent film, or teenagers, or both.
