The Conduit
2024 · 15m · US
Directed by Conor Soucy
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, melancholic, provocative
A grieving father hires a shadowy company that sells communication with the dead, hoping to speak to his deceased son — but the séance delivers a sinister force instead of closure.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The premise itself is the twist — grief-stricken dad hires a corpo death-chat service and gets eldritch horror instead of sentimentality — and Soucy commits to that inversion without winking, which is exactly what makes it work when every other grief-horror short would've played it straight.
Soucy situates this squarely in the séance-horror tradition while understanding what makes that tradition tick: the formal staging, the violation of the threshold between worlds, the slow collapse of rational control — executed with the kind of compositional discipline that acknowledges both folk ritual and contemporary body horror.
The decision to keep the "conduit" itself largely unseen and let the father's face register the thing instead of showing us spectacle on spectacle — that restraint, that commitment to the actor's reaction as the actual horror — is what transforms a familiar concept into something that actually lands.