Nefarious Films

Review by Matt Compton

Running time: 3:20 Mins

Where to see it: http://www.subcentral.co.uk

3 minutes and 20 seconds is not a long time, not a long time at all. It is insanely difficult to tell a story in this amount of time that will pack any emotional resonance . It is rare to find a short film that even attempts this via a traditional narrative, it is rarer still to find one which pulls it off as effectively as Things Best Left.

The film follows the plight of a young woman who finds to her horror that every morning she is waking up with fresh wounds cut into her flesh. As we watch her trying to make sense of what is happening we come to sympathise with not just her physical torment but also her extreme mental anguish.

The director utilises many techniques to make the viewer empathise with Madeleine, our unfortunate protagonist. Chief among them are the disconcerting use of sound, which comes in warped fragments and snatches, and the excellent use of editing to convey her disjointed perspective on life. There are some very effective quick cuts which are almost subliminal indicators of her true situation -the raw bleeding food on her plate for example or the visual flashes that occur each morning as she awakes..

The central performance is very strong with a the voice over on Madeleine's final pleading telephone call being a particularly impressive piece of acting. It is desperate, pleading and real. It would have been easy to descend into melodrama at this point but the performance is pitch perfect and serves to create a truly haunting final scene.

Things Best Left is an accomplished piece of work which manages to pack more emotion and feeling into three and a half minutes than most feature films can in ninety.

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