[Event Review] Final Girls Film Festival Berlin - Shorts Selection

Beta Male

A customer service nightmare comes true for cinema worker Audrey in Marianne Chase’s “Beta Male”. During her post-close popcorn clear-up duties, she encounters a man who is the very personification of self-assured smarniness. He manipulates the situation - negging Audrey and using her job against her - and the situation builds to a tense standoff. Chase uses the shooting location of the Curzon Soho to great effect, the darkened cinema and basement corridors becoming claustrophobic in the presence of the intruder. A satisfying dark comedy, “Beta Male” serves up a delicious slice of revenge.

Occupational Hazard

Workplace horror is taken to the extreme in this film. Diana is confined to her home after she suffered an accident while working in a mine. Struggling to file for injury compensation and plagued by flashbacks, she starts to experience some horrifying changes on her own body. The colour green is ever-present in Occupational Hazard - in a close up of a mouldy tomato we can see the woods that surround Diana’s house, the sky appears a sickly green, and Diana herself begins coughing up green liquid. It’s also the colour of the gas in the mine at the time of the accident, and its subsequent ubiquity reflects the way that accident has affected every part of Diana’s life. Occupational Hazard is a sharp look at the devastating effects of workplace trauma, shown through the grisly lens of body horror.

Inch Thick Knee Deep

Revenge is served with a dainty cup of tea in Anatasha Blakely’s psychological horror. Two women share a tense and passive aggressive conversation, apparently about one’s affair with the other’s partner. As the film continues, layers of the situation become apparent, and we learn that first appearances may well have been deceptive. Blakely’s excellent visual storytelling reveals the characters’ secrets to the audience gradually, and her use of camera positioning to obscure moments of violence make for a genuinely disturbing conclusion. 

Murderers Prefer Blondes

The evil twin is a classic trope in horror cinema, and Mika Bar On Nesher & Mary Neely’s short plays on this theme, featuring twin sisters - one blonde, one brunette. A murderous love triangle ensues between the sisters and Brent, the blonde twin’s boyfriend. The filmmakers make a virtue of their limited resources, with a single location and Neely playing both sisters. Brent is physically embodied by a mannequin (and also voiced by Neely),  giving the film an amusingly surreal air.

Gay Teen Werewolf

Supernatural entities have often been used as stand-ins for the horrors of adolescence, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s monsters of the week, to Ginger Snaps’s lycanthropic puberty angst. “Gay Teen Werewolf” is set in a world were supernatural creatures are part of everyday life but still subject to suspicion and discrimination. We follow one werewolf teen as she negotiates the politics of the LGBTQWW meetings, her family’s expectations and a new relationship with a vampire girl. The film fizzes with the energy of all the best high school movies - a great soundtrack, DIY illustrated title cards and (of course) slo-mo corridor walk for the mean girls. Gay Teen Werewolf is an exploration of the pressures and joys of teenage life, and  a celebration of friendship, family bonds and queer identity.  

It Came From the Kitchen!

A young woman dreams of giant, menacing insects, before waking up on the sofa in a messy apartment. She goes back to bed, looks in despair at her list of tasks (CLEAN APARTMENT, FINISH NEW RESUME, !!!GET NEW JOB!!!), then calls in sick to work and orders a takeaway. Going to the kitchen, she is horrified to find a huge insect lurking among the dirty dishes, and faced with this horror, she is finally spurred to action. It Came From The Kitchen! tackles themes of procrastination and mental health in the guise of a domestic creature feature, and shows that ticking one thing off the to-do list can sometimes feel like battling a giant cockroach. 

Young Forever

This dark thriller focuses on Young Lee, a Korean woman in America involved in an MLM scheme. The dreamlike, slightly disjointed narrative follows her through moments in her life: persuading a young woman to join the scheme, being harassed for money by the menacing Mr Kim, texting her husband and meeting with a wealthy benefactor. Young says at one point, “I’m a simple woman, but my life is complicated”, and although the film shows only a small slice of her life, we can sense the complicated backstory running beneath the action on screen. The film feels like a part of a much larger story, and leaves the viewer curious to know more about Young, and the mysterious intrigues with which she is involved.  

Posted No Hunting

Found footage and stop motion is such a beautifully suited pairing, it’s a surprise that there haven’t been more examples of this combination. In this small and perfectly-formed short, we hear radio calls between people investigating an incident in a woodland, and see the events unfolding via the video feed of a surveillance camera. The stop-motion complements the glitches in the camera feed, and the slightly off-kilter movements of the puppetry lends a truly sinister aspect to the creature design. 

Death Valley

Set on new year’s eve 2080, Death Valley follows a radiologist who decides to blow off a party and instead spend a little quality time on a dangerous, deserted planet Earth. In the empty Mojave desert, she practices yoga in the rocky landscape, in her bulky spacesuit looking like an alien presence on a home planet that is no longer hospitable. She falls and is knocked unconscious, and spends the night out in the open, experiencing nightmarish visions which may not be entirely in her imagination. The film has a retro sci-fi aesthetic, glowing with pastel light and overlaid with grainy effects, which add to the strange, dreamlike quality of the scenes.

Ghoul Log

Ghoul Log is a haunting fable on cannibalism and revenge, told mainly through stop-motion animation. A group of people have gathered at a table for a ritual feast, which is swiftly consumed. As the characters eat, the action changes from puppetry to close ups of actors’ mouths, adding a visceral feeling to the act of eating. Still hungry, the group’s attention then turns to the captives in cages suspended above the table. We again see the unchecked consumption in close-up, the flesh and blood of the victim made horribly tangible. Like all good fables, there is a twist in the end, and a macabre punishment in store for some.  

Demon Juice

Amy has organised the perfect “Best Friends Weekend” for herself and friends Gigi and Nia, complete with relaxing activities and matching t-shirts. However, she didn’t plan on the more boisterous Debra turning up, and things take a more worrying turn when Deb discovers a long-expired bottle of an alcopop called Demon Juice. Her subsequent demonic behaviour is at first mistaken for general rowdiness by her friends, until they discover the true history behind the drink. Demon Juice is a light and refreshing comedy on the pitfalls of group friendship, as well as the dangers of downing suspicious-looking drinks found in holiday rentals. With impressive gory effects and a superb performance from Maddy Wager as the demonic Deb, Demon Juice is a great addition to the comedy possession genre. 

Misophonia

A widow is being comforted by her friend after the funeral of her husband, but becomes distracted by the incessant sound of chewing that seems to be coming from all around. The film centres around the concept of misophonia, defined on screen at the start as “a condition in which one exhibits hypersensitivity to normal human sounds, such as… chewing”. With echoes of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, this noise persists despite others being unable to hear it or find the source. Misophonia is a taut, tense watch, and director Julianna Robinson uses purposefully grating sound design to ramp up the discomfort (especially effective on misophonic viewers like me!) 

Sudden Light

In Spohie Littman’’s haunting film, a trudge through an ordinary corner of the British countryside becomes a quest to deal with anxiety and responsibility. Mia and her younger sister, Squeeze, are heading for home with their dog when they start to experience unsettling phenomena. They become unmoored from normal time and space, constantly losing and then finding each other, and finding that the landscape is shifting and repeating. We discover that the sisters’ father is seriously ill, and Littman uses the uncanny events of the film to subtly reflect the struggles that Mia faces as she tries to find a way to support her sister. 

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