Dark Water
2021 · 15m
Directed by Erin Coates, Anna Nazzari
Genres: drama, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: dark, melancholic, surreal
A grieving woman discovers an impossible ocean manifesting inside the walls of her suburban house, its creatures entwined with her mourning for her mother.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The impossible ocean-in-drywall conceit is genuinely unhinged in the best way—it's not trying to be surreal, it *is* surreal, which means most festivals will nervously pass and miss the point entirely.
Coates and Nazzari have crafted a formally exquisite descent into grief where every compositional choice—the framing of doorways, the choreography of water—dialogues with a lineage of psychological horror and lyric cinema; this is the kind of short that earns its strangeness through rigor.
The decision to let the ocean's creatures remain ambiguous—visual suggestions rather than fully rendered—forces the budget constraint into thematic strength, making the viewer's uncertainty about what's real the entire emotional engine.