Before Seven
2022 · 15m · USA
Directed by Austin Ray, Westin Ray
Tones: contemplative, tense
On a cloudy London day, an American babysitter cares for two young British sisters in a high-rise flat. As small inconsistencies emerge, she begins to suspect that something is dangerously amiss before the girls' mother returns home.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's competent slow-burn stuff, but it never quite commits to the weirdness lurking beneath—the premise begs for something stranger, more genuinely unsettling than 'babysitter feels off about a nice family.' The Rays play it safe where they should provoke.
A disciplined exercise in domestic unease that owes clear debts to Polanski and mid-period Haneke; the formal restraint—tight framing, measured pacing, the babysitter's careful observations—demonstrates a thoughtful understanding of how suspense accumulates through precision rather than incident.
The genius move here is keeping us locked in the babysitter's perspective and letting small behavioral tics—a too-rehearsed answer, a glance held one beat too long—do the work of exposition; it's a film that trusts a performer's micro-reactions and the audience's ability to read discomfort in silence.
Reviews
The build up to the conclusion was excellent really — it fills you with a foreboding sense of dread.
A great short movie about delicate themes... focused on states of emotion rather than answers, with the beautiful, gentle, precise, seductive acting of Meaghan Martin.
Festivals
- Cinequest Film Festival 2022
- Stony Brook Film Festival 2022
- San Diego International ShortsFest 2022