Paracosm
2023 · 10m
Directed by Adam Van Dyke
Genres: crime, horror, thriller
Shabby drug dealer Mak (Paige Henderson) buys a luminescent, futuristic capsule from a silent, impeccably dressed supplier (Nicole Murray) — and the transaction bleeds into bloody deceit. Adam Van Dyke's ten-minute chamber horror plays as an atmospheric slasher with an omnipotent villain and penetrative gore.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A drug deal that pivots into a bloodbath via a mysterious object nobody can quite name — this is exactly the kind of premise that makes people squirm because it refuses to explain itself, and Van Dyke's willingness to let the capsule stay unknowable is what makes it work.
Van Dyke situates this within the lineage of chamber horror and transgressive genre cinema, but the film's atmospheric restraint and considered pacing — letting dread accumulate rather than detonate — place it in conversation with a more formally rigorous tradition than standard slasher territory.
The silent supplier becomes the entire film the moment Nicole Murray's performance choice is made — a figure of complete, unblinking composure opposite Henderson's raw panic — and that single decision to make menace utterly expressionless on a modest budget transforms a premise into something genuinely unsettling.
Reviews
Paracosm sets out to establish the mood of an atmospheric horror but is more successful as a slasher flick. Its omniscient, omnipotent villain, hapless and high character fated to die, and penetrative gore, are certainly characteristic.