Contact (short)

I love Tom Savini.  There, I said it.  I feel a lot better now that's out in the open.  He'll be in a movie called Swine, playing a silent, insane killer.  Swine's director, Jeremiah Kipp has a couple of short films under his belt, including Contact, which landed his job on Swine.

Contact is a largely dialogue-free film about a woman who suffers a bad trip after freebasing.  It's easy to see why Kipp was chosen for Swine: he appreciates visual storytelling and is able to tell a tale using few words.  Contact, however, for all its visual impact, is not without its problems.

The film begins with a couple setting the dinner table.  The husband lays out the cutlery and his wife rearranges the knives and spoons; everything has its place.  The couple is tense and expectant as they await their dinner guest. 

A woman and her boyfriend are strolling through the slums.  He knows the people, she does not; he's her guide through this world and, presumably, the alternate one they'll enter once high.  Interestingly, it's the woman who speaks with the dealer, conveying an over-confidence the dealer chooses to ignore.  When they get high the woman's euphoria quickly turns to horror as she imagines herself stuck to her boyfriend.  Some kind of monstrous mouth-mutation has bonded his face to hers and she fights to free herself.  The boyfriend, who's relatively compos mentis, tries to ground her, but she's too far gone. 

Back at the dinner table the couple welcome their guest.  Their daughter enters and hugs her father.  This is her place, where she belongs.

And yet.

The film ends on the woman, broken and high, still suffering the effects of her terrible trip.

It's hard to know where the story is meant to begin and end, making it difficult to contextualize the events on screen.  Additionally, the overuse of shaky cam prevents us from truly experiencing the horror of the mouth tunnel.  Odd, given the rest of the film looks really good.  Indeed, the characters may be high, but the audience benefits nothing from being forced to "experience" the trip through cut-ins--the film's sound design does the job well enough.

I'm curious to see how Kipp tackles a longer format.  He crammed a lot of horror into the 10-minute Contact and will be working with the same DOP and SFX crew.

And Tom Savini.