When This All Ends
2021 · 15m · USA
Directed by Jordan Sommerlad
Genres: dark comedy, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
Sisters Tess and Gia, dead for years, linger as ghosts bound to their family's upstate New York vacation home, where they bicker, reminisce, and quietly study the living guests who pass through.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Most ghost stories want transcendence or revenge; this one just wants two sisters to complain about the living from behind glass, which is genuinely strange and funny in a way that shouldn't work but somehow does.
Sommerlad situates the afterlife within a lineage of domestic supernatural cinema—think Poltergeist's claustrophobia meets Beetlejuice's irreverence—but earns its own formal restraint by keeping the camera locked to the sisters' perspective, a deliberate compositional choice that deepens the confinement.
The entire film hinges on the decision to make the sisters' immobility absolute: they can observe, narrate, judge, but never touch or alter the living world, and that single constraint transforms a premise that could've been whimsical into something genuinely mournful.
Reviews
The actors waste no time bringing their characters to life.
Festivals
- Fort Myers Beach International Film Festival 2021
- Golden Door Film Festival 2021
- New York Shorts International Film Festival 2021
- SOHO International Film Festival 2021