Blank Shores
2021 · 15m · UK
Directed by Alex Kyrou
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
After her partner Connor mysteriously disappears, Emily's search leads her into an unfamiliar world where she reconnects with him inside his subconscious. The journey becomes a meditation on grief, the loss of a child, and the burden of unspoken mental health struggles.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects sci-fi grief stories to reach for the stars; Kyrou just whispers into the dark and lets you follow. The subconscious conceit could've been window dressing, but he refuses to let it be anything but a mirror — that restraint is more radical than any spectacle.
A formally precise descent into loss that recalls the psychological landscapes of early Tarkovsky while maintaining its own intimate register; the editing rhythm between Emily's world and Connor's interiority establishes a lineage of meditative cinema that earns its melancholy through deliberate construction.
The film's entire emotional architecture hinges on a single sound design choice—the way Connor's presence registers as absence, as texture rather than figure—and that decision transforms a familiar grief narrative into something that actually breathes.
Reviews
Kyrou's mysterious short proves to be an original look at the toll grief takes.
Campbell portrays the emotional trauma Emily is going through so effortlessly.
Festivals
- LA Shorts International Film Festival 2021
- HollyShorts Film Festival 2021
- Trieste Science+Fiction Festival 2021
- New York Shorts International Film Festival 2021
- Montreal International Black Film Festival 2021
- Beeston Film Festival 2021, B'Oscar Award for Best Science Fiction
- Thomas Edison Film Festival 2021, Director's Choice Award
- Flickers' Rhode Island International Screenplay Competition 2020, Grand Prize (Screenplay)