Film Review: Level (short film) (2017)

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SYNOPSIS:

Trapped inside a never-ending nightmare, a cat and mouse game plays out between a man and a hellish beast lurking in the shadows.

REVIEW:

More short films kiddies! Today we have LEVEL, writen and directed by Andrew Hunt.

A few interesting things right of the bat – Mr. Hunt, according to IMDB, was a contestant on a reality show called ON THE LOT back in 2007.  Aspiring filmmakers ran the reality competition gambit for a chance at a big time Hollywood contract.  I didn’t watch it, so I don’t know if he won, but he does have a respectable list of other short films to his credit.

Also, as I sat down to watch the film, a card came up before the titles recommending the film was best viewed wearing headphones. So I did that, and I see why. The sound is rendered in split channel, like a surround sound system.  The score and film sound create depth and distance for the events in the film. So I’m glad I did that.

The sound crew did an incredible job of recording and mixing the sound to create this illusion. A team of four – Tom Hambleton, Matthew Manson, John-Paul Natysin, Jonathan Siri-Mohs – took on the job of putting it all together. Sound guys never get enough credit, in my opinion, and I wanted to make a point of pointing out the ones who did such good work here.

We have only two characters in the story. The main character is called Bishop (Noah Gillett) and he is having a very bad day. The reason he is having a very bad day is because the other character in the story is a monster/zombie/ghoul/thing (Sam Kruger).

So, yea. It sucks to be Bishop.

I don’t wanna give anything away, and honestly I worked out pretty quickly what was going on, and likely so will you, but I’d rather let you come by it honestly than send you into it with spoilers.

I enjoyed it. It was fun, it was cool looking, and not a bad way to spend 20 minutes.

So using my special short scale of one to five, five being awesome, I’m giving this film three monster/zombie/ghoul/things.