In Deep Waters
2014 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Sarah Van Den Boom
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Twins form a close bond before birth, but when one dies in the womb the surviving twin is left with a grief that can last a lifetime, explored in this animated short.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects animation to make grief cute or digestible—Van Den Boom refuses both, which is interesting, but the premise still lands exactly where you'd predict it will, which means it's doing the work everyone already knows how to do.
A formally precise meditation on pre-verbal loss, animated with the kind of sustained visual restraint that respects its subject; the film's architecture—how it moves through abstraction toward specificity—positions it squarely in a lineage of poetic animation that trusts the medium's ability to hold what language cannot.
The choice to animate the bond itself as visible, almost tactile presence before the rupture—that single decision transforms what could be maudlin into something genuinely unsettling, and it's why this 11 minutes feels earned rather than sentimental.