Midwife
2018 · 10m · USA
Directed by Blake Salzman
Genres: drama, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
In a near-future where women die rapidly after a biological attack, a surviving psychologist named Tess works inside a detention center as surrogate, informant, and reluctant investigator hunting a missing girl. Dystopia rendered as quiet procedure.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Genre filmmaking that refuses to bang the drums — the despair sits at room temperature, which somehow makes it worse. Willcox holds the whole architecture up with her face.
Salzman's quiet-dystopia approach — treating institutional horror as ambient rather than spectacle, Children of Men compressed to a single detention center — is exactly the right register for a short. Willcox carries it.
Treating institutional horror as ambient rather than spectacle is the right move for art-house dystopia — Jules Willcox carrying it with despair-and-flicker-of-hope calibration is asking a lot, and the premise of compulsory surrogacy in a detention center is heavy material to handle quietly. The genre/art-house meld is where this lives or dies.
Reviews
A stunningly achieved dystopian tale with a powerful lead performance that navigates unflinching despair with a flicker of hope.