SXSW Review: Thirteen Tales for Chills and Thrills with the SXSW Midnight Shorts
After a long day of festival dramas and documentaries, it’s nice to know that at the end of the day there are midnighter shorts waiting for you. Often passed on by festival attendees in favor for glamorous headliners and indie darlings, this programming block is consistently home to the best genre experiences of any festival, and you never know what you’re gonna get. Weed smoking marionette puppets, sex deprived quarantine horniness, taxidermy musical numbers, and transactional deals with the devil to become a rap god are just some of the premises among the thirteen lucky selections in this year’s SXSW midnighter shorts section, and with pitches like that, how could one not be at least a little intrigued by what’s in store?
Making up the lighter, weirder, and funnier consortium this year were a number of shorts that went for shock value and really leaned into their high concept premises. Joanne is Dead focuses on two neglectful retirement home nurses who dismiss a patient as senile, only to learn through a bait and switch reversal that what she’s saying might have some truth to it. Flick depicts the gradual decent into madness after a reclusive college student picks his nose and a parasitic booger clings to his finger, refusing to vacate and demanding drastic measures be taken for removal. And Run That Shit! tells the aforementioned story of an aspiring rapper who is promised fame and glory if he can steal the coveted fecal matter of a fellow rapper and deliver to the devil. All three of these shorts have commendable elements but were unfortunately compromised for one reason or another, be it inadvertently cruel dialog, predictable cliches, or a flat ending that failed to live up to its proposition.
A standout of the ‘funny-weird’ subgrouping, though, was A Puff Before Dying, a film that lets us know what a 1980s D.A.R.E. advisory warning crossed with Team America would look like. Told using marionette puppets, a teen is about to head out for her Friday night and party with her friends, but before she leaves, her father, the local sheriff, is concerned that she may succumb to the pressures of *gasp* marijuana. To her dad, the daughter would never entertain the idea of smoking weed and quickly dismisses the concern, but out on the road with her friends, she asks, “How much harm could one hit do?” The answer to which is as ironically affirming as it is comedically violent. With a good grasp of absurdist tone, A Puff Before Dying leans into its anti-drug message with a gleeful mix of silliness, surrealism, and sadism that makes this inventive hand-crafted production a surefire (bong) hit.
An abbreviated good time can be had with Flex, a short centered around a body builder having an internal monolog driven by his self-absorbed and self-loathing thoughts. Though its the shortest short of the bunch, clocking in at just four minutes, Flex properly accentuates its verbose monolog with cinematography that emphasizes peak muscular physique and moments of surrealism that channels the body builder’s larger than life ego.
For those who want to chew on some scatter shot existential ideas, you might find mileage with Recklaw. When a post-date night retreat turns sideways and one of the partners is found dead after waking up, an anonymous clean up crew drops in and proceeds to hide any evidence of wrong doing. Confused by what is going on, the grieving woman asks the senior leader of the crew a litany of questions until the details of the evening come into view. The film hits its stride at its midway point when a consistent edit is deployed and the audience’s intrigue peaks. You have no idea what the specifics are nor the circumstances regarding how these events transpired, but there’s enough bait to keep viewers on the hook. Recklaw’s ending doesn’t amass to the fine point one would hope, but for what it’s worth, it tacks on some speculative ideas about the value we assign life right at the end to send viewers on their way.
And then there’s Puss, which I can’t say is good by traditional standards, but it’s unforgettable in the most literal sense. In quarantine, a young woman tries to get laid. After a series of failed passes at prospective hookups, she asks God for assistance, and boy, does God answer. The majority of the film consists of awkward dialog taking place in digital pop up windows and chat messages that are admittedly cringe-inducing, but right as I was about to throw in the towel, divine intervention arises and my jaw hit the floor. Depraved? Comedic? Erotic? Sickening? That’s ultimately for the viewer to decide, but I will say this: I will never forget what I saw that day.
The remaining films in the midnight section go out to the traditional horror enthusiasts out there, focusing on spine chilling tales of the supernatural and unkown. The Thing That Ate the Birds rings similar to The Hills Have Eyes as a hunter kills a feral, Gollum-like creature only to have the remaining kin come after the man to exact revenge. The avant-garde horror short A Tale Best Forgotten makes use of tilting camera movements and a lake’s reflection to depict the eerie titular ballad by Helen Adams about a daughter, her lover, and a foreboding dog-headed man. And The Moogai pulls from the trove of domestic horror to depict a family terrorized by a spirit keen on stealing their new born child.
A pair of shorts, Significant Other and Don’t Peek, were both similarly simple in premise and thrive on their ability to execute on formal elements of the trade. Significant Other sees a couple awoken in the middle of the night by a glowing red orb that only appears when their hall light is turned on. Don’t Peek depicts a girl playing Animal Crossing as she experiences an ominous presence slowly creep into her world. Both run about seven minutes and function on mounting tension with a final moment of release. Every midnight shorts section I’ve ever seen has some take on this tried and true formula. The impact stemming from these films comes down to how well the production succeeds at drawing you in, of which both of these shorts did an acceptable job.
But my favorite short of the entire midnight sections was Theo Rhys' horror musical, Stuffed. The film focuses on a taxidermist who longs for a human specimen to work on. After posting a request on an online forum, she is able to recruit a lonely individual willing to give his life for arsenic-infused immortality. But naturally, a mutual infatuation develops between the two, and their deal is called into question as affections bloom. A natural inclination would be to write off such a macabre musical — at least for my taste — but Stuffed defies expectations with a commendable production value and impeccable songs. Though it ran the longest of the bunch, it was a film I quickly became enamored with, and it quickly became the clear frontrunner of this year’s selection, reminding me once again why midnight shorts continue to be a highlight of every festival experience.
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