From Where It Hides
2022 · 9m
Directed by Quinn Halleck
Genres: drama, fantasy, horror
Tones: contemplative, dark, mythic
A terminally ill man escapes from a hospital and travels to an abandoned mine where he believes he can find Death itself, hoping that reading a particular poem all the way through will let him cheat his fate.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A dying man negotiating with Death via poetry recitation in an abandoned mine—it's absurd, it's sincere, it refuses to pick a lane between horror and mysticism, and somehow that collision is exactly where the thing lives. Most scouts would sand down the weirdness; Halleck leans into it.
Halleck channels a lineage of mythic descent narratives—Orpheus, Persephone, the underworld as threshold—but grounds them in the specific, unglamorous texture of hospital-gown desperation and mineral darkness, creating a meditation on agency that feels both archetypal and contemporary.
The decision to make the poem itself the engine of the narrative—not decoration, not metaphor, but the actual mechanism of escape—is what transforms what could've been maudlin into something genuinely uncanny and alive.
Reviews
The inevitability of the man's plight is heightened by some really gnarly visual effects both for the creature stalking him in the mine as well as the affliction that starts to consume him as he tries to get through the poem.