Caesars Palace
2017 · 7m · USA
Directed by Corey Hughes
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A middle-aged woman travels to Caesars Palace on a business trip following her husband's unexpected death, and her disembodied voice floats between an increasingly messy hotel room and the crowded Las Vegas strip — grief processed through the most aggressively cheerful environment on earth.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Grief as disembodied voice-over navigating a Las Vegas casino — the setting does the formal work that ten pages of script couldn't, and Hughes knows it.
Corey Hughes separates voice from body so we hear bereavement while watching Las Vegas spectacle — a small essay-film gesture that refuses ironic distance and earns its melancholy.
Grief processed through Vegas with a disembodied voiceover splitting interiority from spectacle — at seven minutes that's an essay-film move that could be transcendent or thin. Maryland Film Festival selection nudges me toward the former.
Festivals
- Maryland Film Festival 2017