All Girls
2022 · 14m · United Kingdom
Directed by Anastasia Bruce-Jones
Genres: coming-of-age, horror, thriller
Four teenagers set out on a practice walk for an inter-school 70-mile Dartmoor hike competition, where Heather's ruthless ambition begins to blur the line between reality and delusion.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A coming-of-age thriller that actually earns its surrealism—Bruce-Jones refuses the easy comfort of 'it was all in her head' and instead lets ambition and delusion calcify into something genuinely unsettling, which is exactly the kind of subversive play on genre expectation most scouts would bungle.
The formal control here is remarkable: a 14-minute sprint that understands how to use Dartmoor's landscape as both setting and psychological pressure, situa itself in the lineage of British psychological horror while maintaining the disciplined restraint of contemporary short craft.
The pivot point is Heather's face in the second act—that single moment where competitive drive flickers into something fractured—and from there Bruce-Jones never cuts away, letting the performance do the work that lesser filmmakers would hand to sound design or editing, which makes the whole film feel like it's held together by will alone.