Be Quiet
2023 · 4m · New Zealand
Directed by Gary Davies
Something lurks in the house, and the childhood nightmare says if you stay quiet, it won't find you.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The childhood-nightmare-as-home-invader premise is solid genre furniture, but it doesn't push past the expected—there's no subversive twist waiting to upend the whole thing, which means it's just executing a familiar dread setup competently.
Davies works within the established grammar of domestic horror with discipline, and the four-minute constraint forces real precision in pacing and visual syntax—though it sits comfortably within rather than interrogating the tradition.
The restraint choice is everything here: the filmmaking recognizes that what you *don't* show, and the silence you enforce on the protagonist, creates more pressure than any jump scare could—that formal decision about withholding is what transforms a simple premise into something that actually haunts.