As One
2023 · 8m · Australia
Directed by Jessie Oldfield, Adam Murfet
Genres: drama, musical, silent
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A woman discovers a man on the brink of ending his life in a forest; their encounter unfolds as a wordless dance of conflict and connection.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A wordless dance between suicide and salvation sounds like festival-circuit grief porn, but Oldfield and Murfet actually *subvert* the rescue narrative—the ambiguity of who saves whom, and whether salvation even happens, is genuinely unsettling.
The film's restraint—choosing choreography and silence over dialogue in a moment of crisis—positions it within a lineage of formalist approaches to extremity, where the body's grammar becomes the only text that matters.
The decision to make this a *dance* rather than a conversation is everything: it lets the actors' spatial relationship—approach, recoil, synchrony—do the psychological work that script pages would flatten, and on eight minutes and what must be a modest budget, that choice transforms intimacy into inevitability.
Reviews
As One channels a prescient conversation about male mental health into a transformative encounter, forming a meditative and evocative central journey — moving from a place of despair to a hard-won, shared grounding. Where dialogue would falter, the physicality of dance takes over, articulating a journey through vulnerability that words could never fully capture.