The Siren's Song
2019 · 5m · United Kingdom
Directed by Thomas Longstaff
Genres: dark comedy, experimental, horror
Tones: dark, darkly comic, surreal
A dark comedy about a young tired man trying to get up for work, told in the style of a Gothic poem. Sam is woken by his alarm but struggles against the hypnotic allure of the snooze button, falling deeper and deeper into madness each time he succumbs instead of getting up. Wayne June's booming gothic narration and the glaring red of the alarm play with the perception of space and time, implying Sam's struggle stems from hard-to-define mental-health issues.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A five-minute film that treats the snooze button as a portal into existential collapse—most scouts would dismiss this as a gimmick, but Longstaff's willingness to let Wayne June's gothic narration bloat the mundane into cosmic horror is exactly the kind of unhinged premise that actually *works*.
The formal restraint here is admirable: a single red light, a voice trained in Lovecraftian tradition, and a firm structural commitment to the Gothic mode applied to the quotidian—it's a knowing pastiche that understands its own literary inheritance and executes it with discipline.
Wayne June's narration is the linchpin; his deadpan delivery of actual dread over a man failing to leave bed transforms what could be a student film into something genuinely unsettling, and that tonal precision on a minimal budget is the whole film.
Reviews
Yet somehow the synthesis of the everyday and the gothic really works. Whilst The Siren's Song isn't perfect, it takes a strange concept and makes it work surprisingly well.