by Eric Blume
It’s my fourth year covering the nominees for the Live Action Short Oscar, and this group of nominees is far and away the most grim, depressing, and unrelenting batch yet. Four out of five of these films are about horrible things happening to young boys. You’d think the nominating committee would have cleaved to some other topics. After a while, provided you view them back-to-back, the horror of it all becomes nearly comical. If you have a boy child under twelve years of age, you will definitely want to skip this category this year to avoid going to a very dark place. But all five directors are talented artists who know how to build suspense and tell a story with fluidity and grace. Ready?
Madre (Mother)
This short won the Goya (Spanish Oscar) last year and the director and actress have since reteamed for a feature version, currently in post-production. Director Rodrigo Sorogoyen swings swiftly from an everyday conversation between a woman named Marta (Marta Nieto) and her mother to an urgent phone call from Marta’s son...
The placid everyday energy turns quickly to panic, as Sorogoyen creates a potboiler in our own minds. He gets a powerful performance from lead Marta Nieto, and although the entire movie takes place in one location, he makes several interesting, predatory moves with the camera during long interrupted takes that make the drama intensely immediate. There’s not a lot of there there, but it’s chilling and effective work.
Fauve
Fauve chronicles the power games between two young boys playing across deserted industrial landscapes. It's an arresting tale of our instinct to control rather than to listen, Canadian director Jeremy Comte definitely has facility with young actors and he uses the geometry of his natural visual canvasses to smart effect. Comte gives the film a beautiful grace note at its conclusion, and sustains a dark heartbeat of dread throughout. It’s an accomplished work.
Marguerite
This French-Canadian two hander is the sole non-boy tale: it's about an elderly woman and her caretaker. When the caretaker reveals she has a girlfriend, not a boyfriend, the older woman experiences a transcendence. The two actresses are superb, and director Marianne Farley keeps the storytelling and its emotional details brisk and specific. It’s so different from the other four films that it’s like a breath of fresh air.
Detainment
This one's a true-life story so horrifying that no writer would dare dream it, and it actually creates nausea. Two ten year olds may or may not have committed a brutal crime. This appears to be the short with the biggest budget, as it has numerous locations and an alarming sense of detail to the true-life crime case. Vincent Lambe, the film’s director, commands two astonishing performances from his young actors, finding subtleties within their respective hysteria and armor. The short is almost unbearably intense and thoroughly unpleasant, but it's absolutely spellbinding.
Skin
In this short we follow an obnoxious skinhead as he unleashes his hatred upon an unsuspecting black man. The Israeli director Guy Nattiv has also made a feature-length film of the same name starring Jamie Bell (Danielle MacDonald of Birdbox and Dumplin' fame is in both the short and the feature) which premiered at TIFF in the fall. Nattiv's passion, as distasteful as the subject is, comes across. Nattiv steers his actors away from super-obvious choices, and the story twists in a way that is blackly comic. The ending is too pat, as the obvious alternate ending would have been stronger. But Nattiv has a sure hand for filmmaking, and it’s well shot and edited.
Should win: Detainment could have been very exploitative, but it’s made with both delicacy and ferocity.
Could Win: Marguerite because it’s absolutely different from the competition.
Will Win: Skin. It’s sadly topical, has familiar actors (Jonathan Tucker, Danielle Macdonald, and Lonnie Chavis from This Is Us among them) and has the most "story” so it could well feel the fullest to some voters. That (too) satisfying conclusion might help it towards a win as well.