Girl at Party
2022 · 8m · UK
Directed by Jess O'Kane
An otherworldly teenage girl confronts the limits of her power when she meets a boy at a house party. A largely visual, minimal-dialogue horror noir that explores how women are perceived and perceive themselves under the male gaze, with a femme fatale twist.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Otherworldly girl meets boy at house party, cold visuals against warm score. Reads like A24 starter-kit shorthand — minimal dialogue, ambiguous ending, vibes. I'll watch it because it's eight minutes long.
O'Kane's femme-fatale horror noir leans on a Nicolas Winding Refn-adjacent dissonance between cold image and warm score — a familiar register, executed with control. The premise risks generic A24 atmospherics, but the visual-first ambition is honorable.
Cold detached visuals against warm non-diegetic romance music is a deliberate misalignment, the kind of audio-image friction that makes a femme fatale read as genuinely unresolved rather than just opaque. 8 minutes, near-wordless — the formal restraint should match the concept.
Reviews
Girl at Party is a simple and stylized story about killing, yet highly nuanced too; classically a film noir of the femme fatale variety.
O'Kane establishes much of the mood and our understanding of the film visually, rather than through exposition or dialogue... there is a huge contrast between how the two are shot and the non-diegetic sound that plays — the visuals feel cold, while the music that plays feels otherwise — that these are two people who could be falling in love.
Festivals
- Boundless Film Festival 2023, Best Short Film
- Flicker's Rhode Island International Film Festival 2022
- North East International Film Festival
- GASP! Horror Film Festival