This year’s Dances With Films festival included a wide variety of features and shorts. I’ll be reviewing a small selection this month.
Our Happy Place (2024) wr/director Paul Bickel
Paul Bickel and Raya Miles made this horror film during pandemic isolation, and what it lacks in finesse it certainly makes up for in chills and tension.
Raya is caring for her husband, Paul, in an isolated cabin. He’s bedridden and on oxygen, but we don’t know why. She misses their talks yet nurses him with love and attention.
Her only outlet for communication is her friend on the other side of a screen, the confidante for her fractured dreams where she wakes, cold, in the woods.
There are clues dotted throughout this little film, which plays with time, perception, and instability. There are snap cuts and quick shocks to keep you guessing, and flashbacks to give a sense of who this woman is.
For a low-budget picture, the ideas and effects are very well done, and the psychological horror elements are sharp and unsettling. Miles, in her debut before the camera, is a very strong lead who offers an impassive characterisation that doesn’t quite let you in.
To say any more would be giving things away, so instead, I would say that if this genre is hat you crave around Christmas, you could do a lot worse than Our Happy Place.
It plays on our deepest, everyday, fears and keeps on digging at what passes for humanity and whether we really know those we like and love.
***
Our Happy Place screened at the Dances With Films festival – I reviewed from an online screener.
The Coder (2024)dir Will Crouse
This short is set during a software crisis at a crypto start-up, where everything goes wrong at the same time and makes the market go haywire.
At just 14 minutes this has time to establish a few characters (mainly Mary, perhaps too many on the periphery), while underlying what happens when the digital world we increasingly rely on royally shafts us
There’s the usual toxic boss who nesds to be taught a lesson, who belittles everyone in front of him. Mary is the metaphorical punchbag. Not nice, and rather predictable.
**