Winston
2017 · 6m
Directed by Aram Sarkisian
Genres: animation, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
In a series of letters to his never-seen brother, a troubled man narrates his escalating obsession with his loathsome, cranky neighbor, slipping into paranoia and madness.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A six-minute descent into a narrator's own skull told entirely through epistolary animation—most scouts would've bailed at the premise, but Sarkisian weaponizes the constraint, turning a letter to a phantom brother into something genuinely unhinged and unsettling in ways that feel *wrong* in the best way.
The film's restraint—confining us to one voice, one perspective, one mounting obsession—recalls the psychological precision of experimental animation traditions while the formal choice to never show the brother or the neighbor creates a deliberately unstable narrative foundation that rewards close formal attention.
The decision to animate this as pure interior monologue against a visual grammar of fragmentation and claustrophobia means every frame choice carries the weight of the narrator's deterioration; it's a masterclass in doing psychological horror on a whisper of a budget by letting the voice *be* the landscape.