After adapting Hansel & Gretel, Robert Eggers decided to adapt a tale by Edgar Allan Poe for his next short film. In this adaptation of The Tell-Tale Heart, Eggers uses elements that he has used in his previous short film and that characterize his style. The intertexts, the font style and the black circle are characteristic of classic films and Eggers applies a classic style in this short film. The short film perfectly adapts Edgar Allan Poe's vision giving it a gothic and elegant style. In addition to the costumes, the setting and all the elegance, the short film manages to replicate the tension of the story. There is no dialogue until the end and much of the short film is accompanied by an uncomfortable silence. This contributes a lot to the tension and we see this discomfort in the servant who must take care of the old man. The vulture's eye is not the only thing that disturbs the servant, here what torments him the most is the appearance of the old man. They used a puppet that is very well designed and feels like a living corpse. This could be one of the best adaptations of Poe's works, but the only thing that matters is that it ends in a rather ambiguous way. In the original story, the servant finally confesses to the authorities and although the same thing happens here, it feels different. Here it seems more like the servant loses his sanity, the officers are a product of his imagination and the whole confession seems to happen only inside his mind. That is because they decided to give a lot of priority to the servant's psychology and it was not a bad move. They knew how to take advantage of all the mental torment that the servant suffers in the original story. Here the idea is that the servant ends up in a mental hell from which he can no longer escape and although in the story it is not quite like that, it also leaves the idea that the servant will continue to be tormented by his crime. So The Tell-Tale Heart (2008) is a pretty successful adaptation and is recommended for lovers of Poe's literature. My final rating for this short film is 8/10.
