ALONE
2020 · 5m · USA
Directed by William Hellmuth
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
Kaya Torres, an engineer who barely escaped her research ship after it broke in half, circles a black hole in an escape pod with dwindling rations, kept company only by the distant voice of a stranded survivor on an isolated planet.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
High-concept sci-fi in a shoebox—everyone expects this to fail, and Hellmuth's refusal to leave the pod is exactly the kind of formal constraint that usually suffocates a premise like this, but somehow it works, which is almost disappointing because I wanted to root against it.
A disciplined exercise in constraint-as-aesthetic: the red-light intensification recalls the chromatic rigour of late Tarkovsky, and the two-voice architecture positions itself squarely in the lineage of survival-through-communication dramas, though the execution never quite achieves the philosophical weight it's reaching for.
Six thousand dollars and Hellmuth knows the only choice that matters is the light—that slow creep from amber to blood-red as the pod drifts—and the entire film's suffocation lives or dies on whether you *feel* that gradient in your chest, which it does.
Reviews
Anchored by a solid performance; makes good use of a confined environment.
This film in its world building and fx to dialogue to all the technical execution is just near perfection.
Festivals
- Phoenix Short Film Fest, Best Sound Design
- Edmonton Film Festival
- Other Worlds Film Festival
- HollyShorts Film Festival