Undertaker (Short)
In “Undertaker,” Chris Esper and his screenwriter, Kris Salvi, takes the titular character on a journey towards understanding where he is going. He wakes up by train tracks, and he meets several people along the way whom speak clearly, but imply a lot about the world he wakes up to. The film is not a scary film like “Carnival of Souls,” but that is the vibe I got off of the world- one that seems normal, but has some surreal elements to it that make it richer than it appears.
One of the things I appreciate about Esper as a filmmaker is how straightforward his narrative is, even if the ideas are anything but. There’s a clear throughline that keeps us movie with Dustin Teuber’s Undertaker as he tries to understand what he woke up to, even as we start to piece together our own ideas on the situation. Each character he meets along the way is moving his forward to his next part of the journey. The sense of momentum in “Undertaker” is matched by its mystery. Esper looks at life in a way that is about exploring its possibilities, and its struggles. Sometimes, he uses the past to do so. Sometimes, it’s the present. Sometimes, it’s real world we are familiar with. Other times, it’s a world we find ourselves discovering for the first time. For ten minutes, like the Undertaker, we are initially lost, but by the end we are found. That’s how life operates, after all.
"Undertaker" | Short Film Trailer | 2021 from Stories in Motion on Vimeo.
