The Pond
2018 · 17m
Directed by Dane Elcar
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
A man jogging through a nature preserve to clear his head discovers every path leads back to the same pond, in a psychological horror about being trapped.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The recursive-loop trap premise is solid, but Elcar leans too hard into the surreal-contemplative thing—feels like he's waiting for us to supply the dread instead of manufacturing it himself, and that's a cop-out disguised as restraint.
A tidy formal exercise in spatial repetition with clear debts to Roeg and Haneke, though the 17 minutes doesn't quite justify the concept's weight; the editing is precise but the film never quite earns its own coldness.
The genius move is locking the camera *to the jogger's perspective* so we experience the loop through disorientation and muscle memory rather than explanation—one technical choice that transforms a gimmick premise into something genuinely unsettling.
Reviews
'The Pond' is spooky, without using any of the conventional horror film techniques. It explores the sense of claustrophobia, ironically, in the open…