Winston

It isn't breaking new ground to compare this to the work of Edgar Allan Poe, specifically 'The Raven', but doing so is perhaps the most pertinent way to describe 'Winston (2017)', a short animated horror film about a man who describes his descent into madness in a series of letters to his never-seen brother. Thanks to a commanding performance and a believably unhinged screenplay, the narration reaches out and grabs you by the collar almost immediately. It draws you into the unreliable headspace of the protagonist, enhancing the already palpable atmosphere crafted by the scratchy animation that cloaks almost everything in a thick layer of black shadow. The short is genuinely gripping for its duration, the sort of thing that drops your jaw and keeps it open until it's over. It's so tangibly, satisfyingly gothic. It's a pseudo ambiguous affair that strikes a perfect balance between the explicit and the implicit, while also making excellent use of jarring editing to hint towards the truth of its story. Its plot - and, in particular, its central arc - is familiar in concept, but it's just so well executed that it doesn't matter. Ultimately, this is a delightfully spooky and wonderfully wintery affair that slowly unravels alongside its hero. It's pretty phenomenal.