Birdie
2018 · 8m · Australia
Directed by Shelly Lauman
A woman walking alone through an underground train station returns the smallest of gestures—a smile—to a young man, and is drawn into a tense, near-wordless game of cat and mouse that escalates into menace. Shot in a boxy Academy ratio with almost no dialogue or music, it stages the everyday dread of how a tiny act of courtesy can be misread by predatory men.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's going to call this a thriller about predatory men, and sure, it is—but Lauman's real subversion is making the smile itself the plot, letting a single micro-gesture detonate into something genuinely unsettling without ever winking at the audience or softening the dread.
The Academy ratio feels deliberate rather than nostalgic, a formal constraint that channels the claustrophobia of Kiarostami or early Haneke; the sound design carries the precision of someone conversant in how negative space and restraint have always been cinema's most potent tools for suspense.
The decision to strip away music entirely and let the station's ambient hum become the threat—fluorescent buzz, footsteps, breath—transforms a seven-minute encounter into something tactile and immediate that a bigger budget would only dilute.
Reviews
Shelly Lauman's Birdie taps into that universal fear and confronts its viewers with a scenario many will find too relatable for comfort... a gut-clenching game of cat and mouse with a stranger.
A simple but powerful short film... an example of how bad it is out there for women, how aggressive men can be, and how the tiniest of kind gestures can be misconstrued as an invitation.
Festivals
- Melbourne International Film Festival 2018
- Toronto International Film Festival 2018
- AFI Fest 2018
- Flickerfest 2019