Safety

This is a very contained scene of a short film – one that really doesn't go much outside the room or specific event in terms of what happens on camera, but one that does do a good job of letting the viewer reach out beyond it. On the face of it the situation is pretty basic – a girl looking to have rebound sex, pushes below her usual standards, gets offended when the guy unwittingly calls her fat, and the night ends in a fight. Basically this is it and it could have been played many ways but in the case of safety it plays out pretty evenly in a way that is more engaging than it sounds.

It isn't an amazing short film that will blow you away with its intelligence and observational writing; however it is pretty good because it generally understands its characters beyond the frame of the one scene. Morgan is probably the simpler side of this; the film presents us with a bit of a slob who is clearly a situation of "good enough" who is just happy to have meaningless sex. This is changed through the film and, although he only moved to what I would call "a normal person", I appreciated that he was not just a guy cliché. Understandably perhaps since she wrote and directed the film, there is more meat in Uphold's character of Andy (and in context of the film I should say I did not mean that turn of phrase to suggest she is fat!).

For Andy the film gives us one character but ends us with another. She starts as a girl looking to have sex to somehow get over her ex. I wasn't sure if it was to hurt the ex (since they all seemed to know each other) or to give her something of an emotional boost. I'm not totally sure she wants it at all though since from the start she is working against any type of mood and it takes almost nothing to create a fight out of nothing – and it struck me as odd that someone willing to compromise so much would let a minor thing blow up. I think the point was the breakup had probably been sudden and that Andy didn't really expect it and struggles with the idea that she isn't angry enough with Becks because probably something is wrong with her because after all "he is a really nice guy". As a result the offence over the hip touch is really an excuse to be angry at Morgan, to be frustrated with him and his lack of understanding and consideration but yet also feel the pain of knowing that 'yes, it was me – I'm fat and this guy just proved it'. It is not totally clear to me and I think being older, not in that situation and not a woman limits my insight.

However the film is nicely made so that there is more here than just the superficial and I watched it several times to watch the characters (in particular Andy) to see their feelings and their triggers in the build- up and try to understand better not so much what happened, but why it was always going to happen.