I’m not kidding, get in here.
Here’s a question I bet you didn’t expect to get when you clicked on this post: how long can you hold your breath?
If the answer isn’t “10 minutes,” you might need an oxygen tank to get through Curve, a flat-out genius short film of such palpable tension it will arrest your air intake and seize your senses in a vice grip of awesomeness. Think I’m being hyperbolic? You’re wrong.
Curve comes from writer-director Tim Egan and its set-up is so sinisterly simple it’s not fair: a young woman wakes up in some sort of concrete construct perched on the downslope of a curve over an unknowable abyss. That’s it, the whole film is this woman trying to survive this impossible and malevolent absurdity by seeking to scale the slick slope, but Egan – along with actress Laura Jane Turner – makes this absurdity so frighteningly real, so tangibly terrifying, and so delightfully dizzying that you won’t mind the backflips your stomach does every time our imperiled heroine slides closer to the curve’s tipping point.
Not to get too hoity-toity on you, but Curve reminded me of other works steeped in architectural theory like Samuel Beckett’s short story The Lost Ones or the literary and filmic work of Alain Robbe-Grillet (Last Year at Marienbad), but with a decidedly horrific slant.
I’m still a little too dazed from the experience of Curve to give it its full due, but that’s okay because the film, with no dialogue, more than speaks for itself. And I can promise you this: the final image of Curve will kick you in the gut. I’m talking last-frame-of-The-Blair-Witch-Project memorable.
Press play. And don’t forget to breathe.
Source: Short of the Week
Related Topics: Horror, Short Films
