Twist
2019 · 11m · United States
Directed by Aly Migliori
No choice but to walk home alone, Hannah sees an opportunity for a ride, but others see an opportunity in her.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is dressed up as a thriller but doesn't interrogate its own power dynamics hard enough—it settles for tension when it could've twisted the knife deeper into something genuinely unsettling about who gets to be vulnerable in public.
Migliori works competently within the genre's established vocabulary of dread and framing, but the film doesn't add enough formal argument to the strain-and-threat lineage it inherits.
There's a single moment—likely in how the camera holds or refuses to hold on Hannah's face during the initial offer—where the film decides whether we're watching predation or something more complicated, and that choice reverberates through the whole 11 minutes.
Reviews
The power of film often involves evoking strong emotions in its audience, and that's precisely what Aly Migliori's short film, Twist, does quite well. Writer/director Migliori does a great job building tension at a slow and steady pace, finding the right moment to bring her story to its conclusion.