Faithful (Short)
Niklas Berggren delivers a bomb on the viewer in the third act of his short film, “Faithful.” Admittedly, that, in itself, is a spoiler, but I really wasn’t sure how I was feeling about the film until it landed. In retrospect, maybe I should have expected it, but regardless, it throws everything we’ve seen before into focus. It’s a good movie before, but it becomes a pretty great movie by the end, and something very different.
At the beginning, we see a wife (Lauren, played by Clarissa Hoffmann) talking to a fellow med student Mary-Ann (Cynthia Aileen Strahan) about her decision to drop out of school for her marriage to Ron (Ellis Miller), which has been struggling since he was caught cheating on her. She lays down next to him one night, and has a nightmare about finding him cheating with her, then wakes up to him on the phone with a woman. We next see her meeting Mary-Ann for lunch, and she says some concerning things, and feels the need to call Lauren’s mother. Next up, Lauren and Ron are in therapy, and it doesn’t look like things will work out for them.
Everything hinges on the ending, and while I will not reveal it here, it changes our perception of what the rest of the film does and shows. We understand these characters more, and we feel more things about them than we did before. It’s kind of shocking, but also strikingly beautiful in how it brings the film together. Berggren lands the ending beautifully, and it leaves quite an impression.
Faithful Teaser from Niklas Berggren on Vimeo.
