Never Let You Go
2024 · 16m · US
Directed by Alex Domenici
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
A mysterious box on Ellie's doorstep reopens the wounds of her past: a tape recorder from her deceased, deranged ex-boyfriend reveals his plan to use an occult ritual to bind them together for eternity.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The occult-binding-ritual angle could've been treacly supernatural romance garbage, but Domenici goes full psychological horror instead—the deranged ex becomes a voice in the dark, a dead man's obsession made literal and inescapable, which is genuinely unsettling in ways that resist the typical ghost-story beats.
A formally composed descent into paranoia that understands the grammar of psychological horror cinema; the tape recorder as medium channels a lineage from *Eraserhead* through contemporary elevated horror, and the editing rhythm between past and present feels deliberately, carefully constructed.
The singular choice here is treating the tape itself as the haunting—not visual spectacle, but voice and sound design anchoring the whole dread, which on a 16-minute budget forces all the terror into performance and audio, and it works because Domenici committed fully to that constraint.