Alone (Short)
I feel like I could sustain myself, as a critic, for the rest of my life, so long as I continue to get 2-3 short films a year by Tofiq Rzayev. This is the third film of his I’ve watched this year, and the ninth in three years, and I continue to love the diversity in his work. It’s all relatively serious stuff, but there’s a way about his storytelling that makes any story he decides to tell fun and powerful, depending on what is required. This film is the shortest of his I’ve reviewed, and maybe the shortest I’ve ever reviewed, at 2 minutes, but everything I appreciate about Rzayev’s work comes through in this film, which he wrote with his star, Mehmet Fatih Güven. Güven’s character is home alone, and he sees a ghostly reflection in the TV. He looks behind him, and it’s gone. He looks at the TV again, and it’s there. While the film lacks the gravitas or narrative thrusts of his of Rzayev’s previous films, I nonetheless enjoyed his jumpy little horror short here, which is put together with skill and creativity, even if it isn’t something that can be fleshed out enough to have more than a superficial impact on the viewer. It’s a smart piece of genre filmmaking, and it really gives you what you want out of a horror movie, in the purest sense of the word. It’s worth a couple of minutes of your time.
