Devil in the Gat
2025 · 15m · New Zealand
Directed by Taniora Heketanga Ormsby
Genres: drama, horror, musical
Tones: contemplative, dark, mythic
An aspiring musician discovers a forgotten country singer at a nightclub who may hold the key to his big break – but the answers come with a dark price.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Faustian bargain wrapped in a country song—this is exactly the kind of genre collision that should feel desperate and cheap but somehow doesn't, and that's what makes it genuinely unsettling. Heketanga Ormsby treats the mythology straight, which is the move everyone else would've undercut with irony.
The film situates itself knowingly within both the American gothic tradition and the blues-pact narratives that haunt country music's DNA, executing that tonal register with formal restraint that lets the mythic weight accumulate rather than announce itself.
The sound design decision to let silence hang between the song fragments is what does the work here—it's a small choice, almost invisible, but it transforms what could be a familiar devil-bargain setup into something genuinely claustrophobic and strange on a minimal budget.