Wake (Short)
When her estranged best friend, Jessica, dies unexpectedly, Michelle (Liz Noth), a book publisher, goes home for the first time in a while for the funeral. Some high school friends are hosting a wake for her that night, which Michelle goes to, hesitantly, and there is good reason for her hesitation, as she is not exactly welcomed back by everyone there. The reason for her estrangement from Jessica stems from a relationship she had with Jessica’s boyfriend at the time, Olly (Jake Smith, who also wrote the screenplay), and her absence has made those old wounds scab over. Now, what is supposed to be a celebration of Jessica’s life, becomes a painful and awkward reminder of the past, and why Michelle stayed away for so long.
Sometimes, with character-driven material like Darin Guerrasio’s short comedy-drama, there’s something important about discussing a bit more of the story in setting it up than you normally would. For “Wake,” the situation and the dynamics that Michelle is walking into are important to understand, because seeing how they play out is a big part of the film’s success, and Smith and Guerrasio succeed in telling this story. Painful memories can sometime be brought up with someone’s passing- how we cope with them can be a reflection of who we are, and there isn’t always an easy answer to the question of how we do so. With Michelle coming home, we get a lot of different ways of dealing, many of which have people teetering on the edge of blowing up, but an important think that Smith and Guerrasio do is that, with their actors, they make it all feel authentic and palpable, and they picked a good protagonist in Michelle. She’s reflective of a lot of the complicated feelings and manners of coping going on in “Wake,” not just the cause of some of them, and it’s her emotional journey that is most interesting. I love how “Wake” goes about its business, and it gets to truths that are often difficult to explain.
Wake (Short Film) – Official Trailer from Jake The Myth Smith on Vimeo.
