Film Review: Dark Origins (short film) (2014)

SYNOPSIS:

A psychologist discovers the terrifying trauma haunting her young patient may in fact lurk beyond the girl’s fractured mind.

REVIEW:

Another short film, this time DARK ORIGINS, a crowd funded short out of Australia.

Meet Ella (Rosie Keogh) who has been in a mental hospital since she was a child. All the drugs in the world cannot stop her from seeing the “Shadow People”, the same ones she spoke of following the death of her father (shown briefly in flashback and played by Darrin Davies).

Her doctor Kay (Jane Barry) has been trying to get Ella to tell exactly what it is she sees, and why she is so afraid. But Ella can’t, because THEY will know.

And so the years have gone by, as Kay audio tapes their sessions and analyzes Ella’s drawings and gets absolutely nowhere.

Until today. The moral of the story is that some questions are better left unanswered.

This is a perfect subject for a short thriller. Complete with backstory and character development, and yet uncluttered with unnecessary facts and eye candy.

Written and directed by Evan Green, this is his only established film on record, although he does have two other projects listed as upcoming.

This film doesn’t waste anytime on any frivolity. It is extremely concise, and very well acted. The cast all seem to have a fair amount of experience. Jane Barry is probably best known for her role in Apocalyptic, but she has several short films to her credit as well.

Rosie Keogh is no stranger to performance. In fact, she and Jane Barry have worked together previously on another short, Rise of the Underdog. Ms. Keogh is quite good in this film. She doesn’t oversell it by any means, which would be very easy to do for a less experienced actor.

The only other character we really see very much of beyond these two is a nameless gaurd, played by Paul Vorassi. He has no dialogue in this film, but he portrays the indifference of his character quite brilliantly without any words.

In my opinion, this is almost a textbook example of the short film structure. It pulls you in right away, and holds you there.

So rating with my special “short scale” on a scale of one to five (five being awesome), I’m giving this film four jagged little pills.