Purgot
2015 · 4m · Australia
Directed by Matt Richards
Genres: drama, experimental, mystery
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
A man wakes face-down on a desolate beach in a life preserver, shot vertically on 35mm.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Four minutes of a guy face-down in a life preserver on a beach sounds like the setup for a punchline, but Richards refuses to deliver one—that refusal is the whole subversive point, and it's ballsy enough that it almost works.
The vertical 35mm constraint isn't a gimmick but a formal argument about framing and constraint; shot in dialogue with Bresson and Tarkovsky, Purgot uses its austere economy to earn its contemplative weight.
That the camera never moves and the protagonist barely does either could be a recipe for nothing, but the choice to hold on the ocean's ambient sound and the body's stillness—that decision turns four minutes of nothing into something genuinely unsettling.