Close to the Bone
2017 · 14m · United Kingdom
Directed by Kevin Pickering
Genres: drama, experimental, horror
Tones: dark, provocative, surreal
A man must confront the dark origins of his complex eating disorder to move his life forward.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most shorts about trauma therapy themselves to death—this one goes feral, treating an eating disorder like a possession horror that refuses diagnosis or sentiment. The fact that it works *because* it's surreal instead of in spite of it is exactly the kind of subversive bet everyone else is too cautious to make.
Pickering stakes himself within a lineage of body-horror and psychological surrealism that owes clear debts to Cronenberg and abstract psychodrama traditions, executing the formal choices with enough precision that the grotesque imagery lands as considered rather than gratuitous.
The sound design choice—whether diegetic or scored—appears to be doing the emotional labor that visuals alone couldn't carry, which tells you everything about where the real craft decision lives in a 14-minute film with likely minimal budget constraint.