Surreal and Seductive
Heavy Soul Challenges Temptation
Short films can take many different forms. Many try to tell a tight narrative in the brief time allotted. Others are more visual. In Heavy Soul, director Oren Shai combines narrative and visual elements to explore the themes of temptation, sin, and redemption through the distorted lens of a 1950s-styled social guidance film.
Written by: Oren Shai
Starring: Sally Conway, Joe Cabatit, Guil Fisher, Brittany Kubat, and Pete Ludovico
Rated
Running time: 14 min.
FilmGuru's Rating : 8 out of 10.
The subject of this short morality tale is Dakota (Sally Conway), an innocent girl who finds herself falling in with a group of "desperate teens." While she listens to her Johnny B albums and talks about going to the dance with a guy from the chess club, her friend Judy (Brittany Kubat) suggests that they go to a party.
A voiceover narration (Guil Fisher), describes the troubled teens as if they were in a police lineup. While the kids all seem to typify any parent's worst nightmare, Dakota's downfall is Hal (Joe Cabatit). "The grandson of a plantation master was born with an evil heart: a thief of souls, an addict."
Dakota is drawn into the world of addiction, which is not illustrated with drugs or alcohol. Her addiction is more "morbid" and her decent comes quickly. But this is not merely a cautionary tale of innocence lost. The moral voice of the film is replaced by the voice of science, Dr. Lombardy (also Fisher). He is here to save Dakota, to bring her back into the light.
The narrative may not be complete, but with only 14 minutes I never expected all of the loose ends to tie up. It plays like a trailer to a longer film, but Shai has no plans to rework this short into a feature. Heavy Soul isn't a short story. It's a thought, a moment, a fevered dream that one has before waking.
To say it is surreal is true, but it's more than that. Unlike, say David Lynch's work, the surreal feel of the film comes from the conservative morality and the medieval "therapy" at work in the late 1950s. While Lynch's work is born in of the unreality lying below reality, Shai creates a world where our 1950s era becomes surreal.
Shot with a $10,000 budget and on 16mm film, Heavy Soul looks and feels more professional than a good number of features I've seen. It has good sound production (something that I appreciate more after seeing some amateur efforts), excellent use of lighting, and a clear focus on what it is trying to do. If this is any indication of what we can expect from Shai, I look forward to his first feature.
Copyright ©2002-present by Kevin Wohler. All rights reserved.
All movie titles, images, and sounds are registered trademarks and/or copyrights of their respective holders.
Site design by Wohler Web Works.
Web hosting provided by:
