The River
2013 · 13m · United States
Directed by Sam Handel
A pregnant small-town cashier spends a sweltering day trying to get to the river for a cooling swim, encountering car trouble and colorful locals along the way.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's aggressively nice—a pregnant woman wants to swim, locals are quirky but kind, heat is the antagonist—and that kind of earnest Americana actually works against anything genuinely subversive happening here.
Handel situates this squarely in the lineage of regional American character studies with real formal control; the sweltering landscape functions as both setting and emotional syntax, though the tonal balance between whimsy and tenderness occasionally tilts toward the expected.
The decision to anchor the entire film's momentum on the protagonist's physical discomfort—not crisis, just the specific heaviness of pregnancy in heat—transforms a picaresque into something genuinely intimate, and that constraint becomes the film's engine.
Reviews
The River is one of those charming shorts that will leave a smile on your face.