Buried
2025 · 10m · USA
Directed by Nat Gee
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A winemaker prepping for a tasting becomes convinced her vineyard is being poisoned. Mysterious signs of sabotage stack up as her paranoia infiltrates the work.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Vineyard paranoia on 16mm. The premise is goofy enough on paper to bait me into checking, and Lily Baldwin in the lead promises something stranger than the synopsis suggests.
Gee fuses Polanski's domestic dread with a Reichardt-adjacent attention to labor, and the 16mm winemaker-paranoia premise is a genuinely uncommon shape for a short. The chainsaw moment in the description suggests a filmmaker who knows when to break the contemplative spell.
Winemaker paranoia thriller on 16mm with a suspending strings score and a chainsaw-to-the-vine cut — that detail alone tells me the cutting is committed. Dead crow next to the bad vine is the kind of small unsettling image that earns the slow burn.