Here's the Deal

Two friends go into the woods on a camping trip and it is a perfectly normal conversation that sees things gets get real serious real fast.

There is a nice duality to this film. From the plot description it sounds like we would gradually build towards something, but actually we have both aspects of the film occurring at the same time. So pretty much right from the start we see a bloodied and badly injured character struggling with his wounds after some form of fight (we are not sure of the who's or why's). At the same time however we hear one of the characters describing a dream he had involving Jerry Seinfeld and a tattoo parlour. The dream is told in such a natural conversational tone that it is easy to engage with, while at the same time we have such a polar opposite occurring visually, that the juxtaposition of the two is striking. The ending of the film doesn't really explain the why of this, but it does this in a way I found really satisfying (with the last spoken line of the film being a nice one).

I did want more of an escalation in the voice-over – it is such a nice contrast and natural tone that I wanted it to merge together without so much feeling that it jumps to this situation. I also thought that the excess of the blood and gore from the very start was perhaps a bit too much too soon and I would have liked more focus on throwing the tension and off-mood into the visuals, rather than going the whole hog so quickly. The music doesn't always work – in the violent scenes it does contribute to the unsettling mood well, however the other bits of music feel like they were used because they were available and not because they were a great fit.

All told though, an impacting short film which has a good juxtaposition of material even if I would have liked some aspects to have gone differently to have more build and a slightly better flow.