Show Me (2011) User Reviews

"Do you love me?"

[Foreverisacastironmess123 · 8/10 · 20 October 2015]

This highly effective dramatic classy horror short was sharply directed and well acted, and it had nice production values to it as well. It works just fine as a scary dummy short, but not in the way that you might be expecting. Its approach to the spookiness is entirely psychological. And I loved that, because it was something that turned all of the old done-and-dusted evil dummy themes inside-out and showed that the pint-sized wooden nightmares can still be unsettling without running after people with knives! It doesn't rely on anything like that to be eerie, just the very real twistedness of the human mind. It reminded me a lot of the movie "Pin". I guess it's not of the conventional kind, but I'd definitely call it a horror, I certainly haven't seen all that many horror movies in my life that sent a genuine chill up my spine as this short did. It's about a broken family in the 1930s who were once a successful ventriloquism act together, but the young son apparently perished in some unspecified accident at some point, and in their grief it seems that both parents have fallen to some pretty dark and frightening depths...with the father speaking to the dummy of his secret fears and hatred for his wife, as if it were his own dead son. And as he gets uncomfortably close and intimate with the thing and almost kisses it on the lips it speaks back to him - perhaps from his own damaged mind or his own mouth without him realising it, or something else, it's not clear. And the twist at the end where it's strongly suggested that the wife may have cruelly manipulated her husband into shooting himself through the dummy in her child's voice which you briefly hear her use, because she was just as mentally ill as he was and wanted it all for herself, was weird and disturbing.. But that didn't really add up for me, I think it's up to individual opinion if you want to see it that way or not. I like the ones where you're never quite sure if it's madness or if there's something supernatural going on. It's all very sinister and mysterious... And I like a little mystery, don't you? Good day.