Get Well Soon

A fifteen minute short from UK production company "Brag Productions", this creepy little vignette made on, presumably, almost no budget and perhaps intended as something of a calling card for the talents involved, is nonetheless a highly effective psychological horror with impressively polished production values.

Wisely restricting proceedings to one act and one location, we are introduced to a married couple; the husband apparently recovering from a recent brush with cancer. But between his fragile post-treatment mental state and his wife's seemingly conflicted feelings, things start unravelling fast.

Get Well Soon makes very effective use of its claustrophobic domestic setting, with liberal use of abstract close-up framing and extreme shallow focus, giving a discombobulating sense of events slipping in and out of reality. Moreover it effortlessly conjures a creeping sense of unease with minimal dialogue and a brooding melancholic score. Particularly impressive is the restrained, but genuinely grotesque FX work, which has all the gloopy, sticky physicality of the best pre CGI horror movies, but with none of the fake rubberiness that usually accompanied them.

Straddling a line somewhere between psychological trauma and visceral horror, this is genuinely impressive work that recalls most strongly the look and feel (and preoccupations) of early David Cronenberg. Which is very good, bad company to be in.