Destiny Jones is a NYPD detective. A case involving the sexual assault of a young girl turns out to be a challenging one for her on many levels; primarily the case seems like a dead-end, with insufficient evidence to move things forward, but on another level the case also triggers her memories of her own repeated sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather.
Although it sounds like a pretty dark narrative in this short film, to be honest for the most part it is really very flatly delivered. We open the short with a scene that could be from a horror movie given the very heavy "ominous" music that accompanies the situation where a man enters a young girl's room; of course the situation in some ways deserves to be treated as a horror, but the tone feels too heavy and poorly judged. This lack of deft touch continues for much of the film, as we get a police procedural which really doesn't have much polish to it in any regard – the performances, sets, locations, characters, dialogue, all of it is functional but never really doing more than the basics.
This was probably why the ending threw me for a loop. It suddenly gets very dark, very quickly; a situation arises where the characters beyond murky, the motivations are unclear, the events are pretty challenging, and generally it has all the shading and intrigue that the rest of the film needed. I think the full-stop conclusion is not as satisfying as being in that moment of the film beforehand, but it still was a brave and effective final 4 minutes. Just a shame that the whole film did not have that impact.
Although it sounds like a pretty dark narrative in this short film, to be honest for the most part it is really very flatly delivered. We open the short with a scene that could be from a horror movie given the very heavy "ominous" music that accompanies the situation where a man enters a young girl's room; of course the situation in some ways deserves to be treated as a horror, but the tone feels too heavy and poorly judged. This lack of deft touch continues for much of the film, as we get a police procedural which really doesn't have much polish to it in any regard – the performances, sets, locations, characters, dialogue, all of it is functional but never really doing more than the basics.
This was probably why the ending threw me for a loop. It suddenly gets very dark, very quickly; a situation arises where the characters beyond murky, the motivations are unclear, the events are pretty challenging, and generally it has all the shading and intrigue that the rest of the film needed. I think the full-stop conclusion is not as satisfying as being in that moment of the film beforehand, but it still was a brave and effective final 4 minutes. Just a shame that the whole film did not have that impact.