The Trip
2026 · 10m
Directed by Arabella Anderson
Three friends take a weekend trip that awakens something living inside one of their heads.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A premise that should be DOA—three friends, weekend trip, body horror brewing—except Anderson flips it into something genuinely unsettling by making the 'something' less monster and more *idea*, a thought that spreads between skulls like contagion. It's the kind of film that makes you suspicious of consensus, which means it's working.
Anderson demonstrates formal command in how the surrealism accumulates through editing rhythm and sound design rather than exposition, situating the film in a lineage of Cronenberg-adjacent psychological horror that respects the viewer's discomfort as a legitimate aesthetic choice.
The singular choice here is the decision to keep the awakening *internal*—no practical effects, no reveal—and let performance and the acoustic space between the three characters carry the dread, which transforms a modest 10 minutes into something that lands harder than films twice its length.
Reviews
THE TRIP is a horror short about what lives inside your head — and what happens when something opens the door.