Maggie
2023 · 15m
Directed by James Kennedy
Genres: horror, mystery, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A young health worker trying to place a lonely old man into private care discovers, as strange things start happening around his squalid house, that he may not be completely alone after all.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent haunted-house setup that doesn't quite commit to the weirdness—the premise dangles something genuinely unsettling (what if the old man *knows* what's there?) but the film plays it safe, landing somewhere between social realism and jump-scare thriller instead of weaponizing that contradiction.
Kennedy demonstrates assured control of tone and pacing within the British social-realist-meets-genre tradition, and the formal restraint—what we don't see, the sound design's strategic silences—positions this squarely in that lineage of character-driven horror that privileges dread over spectacle.
The entire film turns on one choice: the decision to keep the health worker's dawning realization almost imperceptibly subtle, a shift in how she listens rather than looks, which transforms what could've been routine genre mechanics into something genuinely haunting on a micro-budget.