I'm now and then sent short films to comment on. Few of these seem like personal requests, so I rarely do. This one was. You're probably going to see it in a film fest or the internet, and I hope it does well. So this is not about advising you on money well-spent or not. It's about constructively supporting young vision, some of these guys after all are going to be our filmmakers ten years from now.
The plot is intentionally barebones, a security guy in a supermarket tries to be of help. It's the instrumentation that matters (the film is dialogue-free). It has consistent, rather whimsical tone and sudden bursts in the flow. These are more pronounced as musical intonation in a few scenes that could be taken in pretty cool directions. Another scene makes it seem as though our guy has been sucked into and merged with a young boy, but it is hide-and-seek with the camera.
It may remind you a bit of Svankmajer when you get to the finale with puppets. It's a creative way to end on a stage: our guy was a dutiful performer in a world that didn't appreciate him, so fashions his own in the back of his head. It is effective layering that just lacks the running time for greater imports.
But such are the limitations of a short film. I'm not a fan of the format beyond a notebook of quick sketches. However, the guys in this show they are more than able to mount a film and ready to graduate to feature length format, which seems to be their wish also. There is a pretty excellent floating camera near the start (I would excise the intertitle though). I wish them well.
