Stop Taking Pictures
2025 · 15m · USA
Directed by Arlin Godwin
Genres: drama, horror, mystery
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
After Aaron Hayes loses his wife Lilly to a freak metro accident, the grieving photographer turns to his camera for solace, and his pictures begin to tell another tale. Shot in grayscale across the Washington, DC subway system, the film blurs reality and imagination as the negatives terrorize him.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A grief-haunted photographer whose negatives develop a mind of their own is genuinely unsettling, but Godwin's playing it too straight—the surrealism needed more teeth, more refusal to let us know what's real, to really earn the premise's weirdness.
The grayscale subway becomes both archive and crypt in this formally rigorous study of how photography can't save us from loss; Godwin's command of the image as both evidence and haunting sits squarely in the lineage of Chris Marker and the essay-film, executed with real compositional discipline.
That choice to make the negatives themselves the antagonist—to let the camera's mechanical memory become the source of terror rather than comfort—is the hinge the whole film turns on, and it's executed with enough visual specificity that it transcends the conceit.
Reviews
A tight storyline that rarely digresses from its focal point–of psychology, perhaps even anomalistic psychology and the paranormal, the short is a must-watch for the aficionados of its genre. Godwin brings a perfect balance between them all, leaving his audience in wonder, in suspension of disbelief and an eerie curiosity that perhaps only a sequel can satiate.