It's Natural to Be Afraid

I was recently invited onto a panel of voters for a New York-based film festival called Beneath the Earth, the primary point being to watch and review a selection of seven short films. Voting just closed a few days ago, so over the coming weeks I'll be reviewing each of the seven shorts here on the ol' blog. If you want to watch them just click on the link I provided for 'Beneath the Earth', they're all of a high quality and definitely worth checking out. Anyway, here is the first of these films...

It's Natural to Be Afraid was one of my three favourites (though not my absolute favourite) of the competition. Overall, I liked the way it revisited the same material more than once from different angles to reveal layers of meaning - it was really well done and completely self-assured. I think that kind of editing can be hard to pull off sometimes, but it was brilliant in this film. Technically speaking, the cinematography and editing are top notch. There's a really lucious use of deep focus and some thoughtful framing. In short: it's no bum deal, this is a high quality film, and an absolute pleasure to watch from a technical standpoint.

The plot behind this short film is that the Ryan (James Clarke) is getting over the death of the love of his life, and he meets up with a new potential love in Mya (Mika Hockman). I won't give away the circumstances of this meeting as that's pretty much the whole point of the film, but suffice to say it's a film about transitions and it tackles this big idea in as much breadth as a film of nine minutes can probably manage without getting weighed down in unecessary dialogue. The only aspect of this film that let me down a bit was that the story isn't really all that unique, it's definitely a case of style over substance. I don't mean to downplay the importance of stories like this, but I felt like the use of voiceover was a little bit pretentious and the film might've breathed better without out. That aside though, it's a wonderfully put together piece of art and is worth ten minutes of your time.

DIRECTOR: Justin Doherty
WRITER/SOURCE: Neil Fox
KEY ACTORS: James Clarke, Mika Hockman, Mark Drake

RELATED TEXTS:
- Some similar themes of intersection, grief and love are dealt with in more detail in the film 21 Grams.
- Doherty previously worked on the short film Somewhere, Anywhere.
- Lead actor James Clarke's main previous credit was as 'Shaun' in the film Son of Rambow.