We Wanted Children
2022 · 15m
Directed by Tim O'Connor
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
After a marital crisis, Ginny grows concerned with her husband's increasingly disturbing behavior.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like boilerplate domestic thriller until you realize the film is actually interrogating which partner we're supposed to fear—a genuinely unsettling refusal to pick a side that most shorts would botch by leaning into obvious menace.
O'Connor constructs this with the formal precision of psychological horror cinema, positioning ambiguity as architectural rather than accident; the editing rhythm and spatial blocking deliberately withhold the clarity audiences expect from the genre.
The film hinges entirely on a single recurring choice—how the camera holds on Ginny's face during her husband's mundane moments—that transforms 'is he dangerous?' into 'what is she becoming?' with almost no dialogue, which is where the entire film lives or dies, and it absolutely lives.