Martha
2019 · 16m · UK
Directed by Christopher Haydon
Genres: drama, mystery, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
A teenage girl wakes with a head injury to discover she may be the last person on Earth, building rituals around her mother's final answering-machine message until she encounters one other survivor with whom she shares a mysterious connection.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects post-apocalypse to be about survival or spectacle, but Haydon just... doesn't care—he makes it about a girl talking to her dead mother's voicemail like it's the only real thing left, which is genuinely unsettling in a way that actually earns its weirdness.
The film's restraint is almost classical: it understands that the apocalypse is merely the frame for an elegy, and the formal discipline of those accumulated rituals—each repetition a measured beat—places it squarely in the tradition of contemplative cinema that knows how to hold silence.
That answering-machine message becomes a talisman through sheer repetition and close attention to how the girl's face changes each time she listens—one sound design choice and one performance choice, and suddenly the entire emotional architecture of isolation clicks into place.
Reviews
A compelling drama, and a rather captivating mystery... a marvelous short film.
Christopher Haydon does an excellent job at directing, often successfully showing us rather than telling us.
Festivals
- BFI London Film Festival 2019