Where the Shadows Fall
2016 · 14m · USA
Directed by Kate R. Phillips
Genres: drama, sci-fi, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A man wanders a barren, post-apocalyptic purgatory searching for the family he lost long ago. When he chances upon a gathering of surreal strangers in the woods, he believes he may have finally found what he seeks — or it may be just another illusion.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Phillips takes the post-apocalyptic wasteland — probably the most exhausted premise in genre cinema — and actually *exits* it into something weirder: a purgatorial logic where the real horror isn't survival but the possibility that you've already stopped being real. It's the rare film that uses sci-fi scaffolding to demolish sci-fi.
The film's formal restraint — its refusal to explain the carnival, the grief, the slippery ontology — positions it squarely in the lineage of Tarkovsky's meditative speculative work and contemporary experimental narrative cinema, where ambiguity becomes the truest form of emotional precision.
The choice to let the strangers' carnival performance *become* the narrative rather than interrupt it transforms what could be a conventional ghost-story beat into something structurally radical; Phillips trusts the viewer to feel the protagonist's uncertainty about reality as a lived formal experience, not a plot twist.
Reviews
An aptly titled thriller that aims to strip the veneer of civility to show the barbarous factions lurking in the margins of society.
The scene is discomforting and paranoia generating.
Festivals
- Columbia University Film Festival 2017