Brackish
2022 · 8m
Directed by Christa Boarini
Genres: fantasy, horror, thriller
A cursed spirit known as the Brackish Undertaker waits in the mangroves for a young artist whose capture will pass her thorny crown — and her curse — to a new bearer.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Brackish walks a tightrope between folk-horror earnestness and actually committing to its curse-logic, which most shorts punt on — but Boarini doesn't blink, and that refusal to wink at the audience is genuinely disarming.
The film's visual restraint and mythic pacing place it in conversation with contemporary horror cinema's return to folkloric grammar, though it risks being absorbed into a crowded lineage rather than interrogating what makes its specific version of the curse-bearer narrative necessary.
The decision to keep the Brackish Undertaker mostly unseen until the final moment — letting dread live in negative space and water-sound — transforms what could've been a conventional creature reveal into something that actually lands because Boarini trusted the audience's imagination more than the budget would normally allow.