Contraction
2024 · 10m · USA
Directed by Andy Greene
When a mother goes into labor, she discovers something is terrifyingly different about her husband — the father of their child. A 10-minute domestic horror-thriller that uses the vulnerability of childbirth as its monstrous backdrop.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most filmmakers would run screaming from the idea of making labor itself the horror set-piece, but Greene leans *into* the body's betrayal at its most exposed—turning the moment everyone's supposed to celebrate into something genuinely uncanny and wrong. It's the kind of premise that makes you uncomfortable for all the right reasons, which means everyone else will probably hate it.
Greene situates this squarely in the lineage of body horror and domestic dread (Polanski, Eggers' shadow looming), but the formal choice to synchronize the reveal with the literal moment of vulnerability—using the grammar of medical cinema against itself—feels like it has something to say about how we frame women's bodies onscreen. The restraint required to make that work is considerable.
The decision to shoot with Hlista at eight months pregnant wasn't just a casting choice; it collapses the boundary between performance and reality in a way that makes every contraction, every gasp, every moment of physical exposure *real* in a manner you can't fake, and that authenticity is what makes the husband's wrongness land with actual dread.
Festivals
- Brooklyn Horror Film Festival 2024
- NoHo CineFest 2024
- Great Plains Film Festival 2024
- Indie Suspense Film Festival 2024, 2nd Place - Suspense Short
- Athens International Monthly Art Film Festival 2024, Honorable Mention - Best Short
- Festival Angaelica 2025