The Curtains Glow At Night
2025 · 10m · USA
Directed by Skye Schoenhoeft
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A college student named Wren comes home for break and shares her childhood bedroom with the ghost of a small child. Between a self-portrait assignment and family obligations, she circles the question of who she used to be.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
I usually flinch at ghost-as-metaphor shorts, but pairing the haunting with an art-school self-portrait assignment is sneaky-clever — it makes the metaphor literal in a way that's hard to dodge. I'll bite.
A haunting framed not as horror but as homework — the ghost sharing space with a self-portrait assignment, the assignment being the scarier one — that's a quietly brilliant formal gesture from Schoenhoeft. Hauntology at the smallest scale.
Ghost-as-homework-assignment with a self-portrait deadline is a sharp framing — the homework is scarier than the haunting is the entire thesis. 16mm daylight palette and Caroline Buddendorf carrying it solo gives me confidence in the patience.
Reviews
A moody observation of one's reflection on their youth and past self
an atmosphere that shifts between magical ambiguity and familiar reality