Short Film Review #62

Last year, I made a weekly feature out of short film reviews (if you explore the film tag, you can find them all) but in the name of reclaiming some semblance of a normal life, I’ve put them on hold. Things still pop into my awareness or my inbox though so I thought I’d flag these up. 

Not quite a short film but an interactive video game, 5 Minutes features newly-announced Beowulf Kieran Bew (and it’s good news, he’s a bearded Bew in this one) as a father trapped in a zombie nightmare with his teenage daughter. You can select three levels of difficulty to help them through their journey to try and escape the zombie curse (I’ve managed medium, just about) and it is all rather well done. I’m no expert at all in this kind of thing though so make of it what you will!

Pet Shop Girls from Kirsty, Luke, Ed & Ben on Vimeo.

Pet Shop Girls is a delightfully surreal sitcom in the making, full of off-kilter characters and wryly amusing dialogue as we follow a day in a high street pet shop. Written by Kirsty Woodward, Luke Norris and Ed Hancock and directed by Ben Aldridge, it really is rather good, you could imagine it slotting into BBC3’s schedule quite easily. 

A little behind the times here – The Departure saw Gillian Anderson reprise her award-winning role as Blanche DuBois as Andrew O’Hagan’s short film imagined a prequel to Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. It acts as a kind of prologue to Benedict Andrews’ production, taking place in the modern day and in the days before she arrives at her sister’s home. Directed by Anderson herself, it offers intriguing layers of backstory to events and places merely mentioned in the play proper and has a darkly theatrical feel to it.

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