Break My Bones
2023 · 23m
Directed by Anthony Collamati
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, horror
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A troubled ten-year-old girl confronts her own capacity for evil when her mother forces her into the mentorship of a disturbed old man.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The setup screams after-school-special corruption arc, but Collamati refuses the obvious catharsis—there's something genuinely unsettling about watching a child's moral compass *not* recalibrate, and that refusal is the only interesting thing here.
A competent descent into moral ambiguity that borrows from the psychological horror tradition without quite finding its own formal voice; the editing is assured but the film doesn't interrogate why we're watching this particular act of corruption unfold.
Collamati's decision to shoot the mentorship scenes in claustrophobic static wide shots—letting the girl and old man occupy the same frame without cutting—creates an unbearable complicity that a conventional shot-reverse-shot would've diffused entirely.