Julien Neaves, Editor
Your average horror movie needs about an hour and a half to try and scare the pants off a viewer. But what about a horror film that delivers on the chills in just five minutes?
That’s the case with horror short Filtered which premiered on April 24 at the Cabane A Sang (Blood Shed) Film Festival in Montreal which celebrates “Horror, Sci Fi, and Trash cinema”. The film is written, directed, and edited by Vincenzo Nappi, an award-winning Canadian writer and director best known for making canuxploitation films (Canadian “exploitation” cinema, which I didn’t even know was a thing) with a focus on the horror and thriller genres. Nappi is also the co-director of the Concordia Film Festival and a Film Studies student at Concordia University.
It is hard to do a review of a five-minute film without getting into spoilers, but I think I’m up to the task. Filtered tells the tale of two friends Jasmine and Marco (played by Jasmine Winter and Marco Carreiro respectively) on a video chat. Jasmine (the character, not the actor) has had a rough day at work and the affable Marco (again the character, not the actor) decides to put on some funny filters to cheer her up. But it’s a horror movie so things go horribly, terribly wrong.
Both actors do a good job of making their characters feel real and relatable, and this is easily the film’s greatest strength. And when it goes full horror it does a decent enough job, and I will admit to being creeped out (not an easy feat, I must tell you). Where I do have to deduct points, however, is in the concept of the horror itself. I mean, there is ambiguous and then there’s dropping stuff out of nowhere, and in Filtered it feels like the latter. I have no problem with not knowing the “how” or “why” but the film suffers from not having any hint about the “what”, and I think it would have benefitted tremendously from at least a couple of breadcrumbs. That said, it was a cool little film and not a bad way to spend five minutes.
Editor Jules’s Score: 5.5 out of 10
For more video chat-related horror you can check out Horror Head Writer Sommer’s review of Host by clicking here. Or for another very short horror short you can check out my review of three-minute Trinidad and Tobago film 19 by clicking here.
Julien “Editor Jules” Neaves is a TARDIS-flying, Force-using Trekkie whose bedroom stories were by Freddy Krueger, learned to be a superhero from Marvel, but dreams of being Batman. I love promoting Caribbean film (Cariwood), creating board games and I am an aspiring author. I say things like “12 flavours of awesome sauce”. I can also be found posting about TV and movie memes, news and trailers on Facebook at Movieville. And to stay on top of all Redmangoreviews articles you can like and follow us on Facebook here.