Human Beings

Essentially this film is about a load of northern teens who have a party where the unspoken social hierarchy applies, and the next morning they have to deal with some of the consequences of going against that norm. It sounds pretty regular fare and I guess at this level it is pretty much what you would expect. The film manages to rise above this though, due to some good touches. The first is that the script doesn't labour things and indeed it is pretty light on dialogue for the vast majority of the film, instead leaving it to visuals to do the work. I liked this because it felt like things were clear without needing characters to hand me the scenario via unnatural expositional dialogue.

This use of the visual is of course the central concept since all the teens are dressed as animals. Narratively this is for the party they are going to, but it is also part of the character of the film since the type of animals they are tell us something about them and fit the mould of the usual teen drama – with our lower-level guys being zebras, the attractive girl being an unicorn, the main bully being a lion and so on. Okay so it is not amazingly clever in the detail, but it works with the idea well, making a nicely self-contained short teen drama from it, which does what you expect but at least feels quite fresh as it does it.