The Lone Piper
2025 · 9m · US
Directed by Matthew Kravchuk
Genres: historical, horror, war
Tones: contemplative, dark, mythic
During the French and Indian War, hardened soldiers force their young bagpipe player into battle, only to find the enemy is not what they expected — a folk-horror meditation on colonialism and xenophobia.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise wants to be subversive — colonialism bad, folk-horror weird — but it's still working in a pretty familiar register: soldiers + bagpipes + twist ending. I'd rather see Kravchuk actually break the frame instead of just flipping its moral.
A formally accomplished meditation on the machinery of war and xenophobia, situated thoughtfully in the lineage of revisionist historical cinema and folk-horror tradition; the 9 minutes discipline the material into something genuinely mythic rather than didactic.
The choice to let the bagpipes carry the emotional weight — making an instrument typically coded as martial into something uncanny and alien — is the decision that makes the colonial critique land rather than lecture.