Ringing Rocks
2022 · 17m · United States
Directed by Gus Reed
Genres: horror, surrealism, thriller
A couple retreats to a desert resort after one of them suffers a serious mental health episode, and reality itself begins to shift around them.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Reed takes the tired 'retreat gone wrong' setup and weaponizes it—the shift from psychological realism into surrealism doesn't feel like a twist, it feels inevitable, like reality was always unreliable and we were just waiting for the film to stop pretending. This is the kind of premise that makes you angry other people aren't talking about it.
The film operates within a lineage of body horror and domestic uncanny (Polanski, Eggers), and while the surreal turn is executed with formal control, it risks collapsing the emotional specificity of mental health into visual abstraction—a choice that privileges aesthetic coherence over the messiness the premise promises.
There's a particular moment where the sound design fractures and the couple's dialogue begins to layer over itself, and suddenly the unreality feels earned rather than imposed; that single decision—letting audio do what image alone couldn't—transforms the whole second half from concept-driven to genuinely unsettling.
Reviews
The whole atmosphere throughout Ringing Rocks makes the viewer feel unsettled. The plot could've used a bit more meat on the bones, yet the short's very effective overall.