Fissure
2017 · 11m
Directed by Paul Wright
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, melancholic, surreal
A grieving mother who has turned to drugs after losing her young daughter becomes convinced that her nightmares are revealing what really happened on the day the girl disappeared. As the visions bleed into her waking life, she follows them in search of the truth.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects grief-thriller-horror to collapse into sentimentality or jump-scares, so watching Wright let the nightmare logic just *live* without apologizing for it—treating a mother's drug-addled visions as epistemologically valid—is genuinely perverse in the best way.
Wright positions this within the lineage of psychological horror that trusts unreliable perception (Polanski, early Aronofsky), and the formal discipline of not cutting away from the surreal—holding on image and sound as they distort—shows real command of the medium's syntax.
The decision to blur the boundary between nightmare and investigation without a visual grammar to distinguish them—so you're genuinely uncertain what's metaphor and what's evidence—lifts what could be a standard grief-story into something that makes the formal ambiguity do all the emotional work.
Reviews
Horror DNA praised the short's handling of a mother's grief, its creative effects portraying her drug-fuelled nightmares, and Emma Laidlaw's performance, while noting the 12 minutes leave the father's grief underdeveloped.