Sundance '23: The Midnight Shorts Program

While I don’t have boots on the ground in Park City this year, I got myself a virtual pass and plan on spending a few days on the couch checking out selections from the festival line-up. Here’s the rundown of what I’m watching.

If there’s one thing I love about film festivals, it’s a good shorts program. Considering there’s almost zero ecosystem for short films to find audiences, these kinds of line-ups are crucial parts of festivals and often will feature some incredible work you aren’t going to see anywhere else.

The shorts program in the Midnight section of this year’s festival did offer up a few wild gems, but not everything worked for me. Let’s see what’s what:

In the Flesh - Daphne Gardner - 13 min. - USA

Brooklyn-based filmmaker Daphne Gardner’s In the Flesh is a dark horror comedy about Tracy, a woman addicted to jerking off with her shower faucet. She keeps a journal of her sexual adventures, including how many orgasms she has each sesh, and any other fun details she can recall. During one of these sessions, brown sewage-type liquid start oozing from the faucet and soon, Tracy herself is leaking dark fluid from her own body. Where it goes from there features a lotta ooze, a super-creepy basement, and more. I found the film very affective with the scares, while also addressing things like pleasure, desire, and sexual violence.

A great thing about watching shorts is you can often spy the potential (and weaknesses) in up and coming artists and after In the Flesh, I’m very eager to see where Gardner’s work goes next.

*A leather bar has a plumbing problem in* ***Pipes***

Pipes — Kilian Feusi/Jessica Meier/Sujanth Ravichandran — 4 min. — Switzerland

Another fantastic thing about shorts programs in festivals is that it’s a hotbed for wild, experimental animation that you won’t find on Disney+—or possibly anywhere else, really. So I was delighted to spy an animated film in the Midnight shorts program (I also watched the official Animated shorts program at the fest and will log that elsewhere).

Pipes is pretty straightforward, a plumber gets called to fix some pipes and it turns out the job is at a gay fetish club. At first he’s a bit apprehensive upon entering the space, but after a while, he starts to relax… and maybe even gets in a little too deep!

Very trippy, funny, and filled with ginormous dicks and other phallus-shaped objects. A great time!

*A couple becomes a bit too connected in* ***A Folded Ocean***

A Folded Ocean — Ben Brewer — 14 min. — USA

This was the first film in the program that didn’t work for me in any way. An unnamed couple is shown being flirty, then intimate and then… they get a little too close. I read this whole endeavor as someone was tinkering around with the special effects you wind up seeing in the film and then decided to build out a story around those VFX. I’m sure that isn’t what happened, but that’s the way this felt as I watched.

The effects, while reaching near Cronenberg-levels of ick, ultimately don’t create visuals that are interesting enough to look out without anything else going on around them. This quickly became a very boring 14 minutes. I hope whatever Brewer tries next features a little more oomph in the story department and doesn’t just act as a showcase for a neat visual effect plug-in.

*Maret Sofia Jannok in* ***Unborn Biru***

Unborn Biru — Inga Elin Marakatt — 19 min. — Norway

Not a bad debut from author and reindeer herder Inga Elin Marakatt, whose short about a struggling, pregnant widow who steals silver off a corpse to help her family gives off strong folk horror vibes a la The VVitch, Hagazussa, and last year’s incredibly solid You Won’t Be Alone. We’ve got mystical forces, barren terrain, and yup, an eerie little kid!

The film is very simple, but also powerful in its own way. I wasn’t completely bowled over, but it’s a helluva debut effort. And it’s cool that Marakatt is an actual reindeer herder in the northern Norwegian region of Sápmi; the majestic creatures in the film are gorgeous and Marakatta stated that it was her intention to show a little of how the women of Sápmi have survived for generations working with and caring for these animals.

*Babs Olusanmokun in* ***Power Signal***

Power Signal — Oscar Boyson — 20 min. — USA

Okay, so this was the stand-out in the program for me. Power Signal, the latest from Oscar Boyson, an accomplished producer whose resume includes work on films like Frances Ha, Mistress America, Uncut Gems and Good Time, is a weird, sci-fi tale that follows Lincoln, an Uber Eats-type delivery guy who finds himself in the middle of a One Crazy Night adventure after agreeing to make an omakase delivery for a fellow delivery guy who can’t make the run. Word has gotten around to the delivery driver community that there is a mysterious, potentially dangerous driver lurking around town who may have something to do with a recent string of infections experienced by women in the city. The driver in question, with his unseen face and creepy biker helmet outfit, evokes the look of the killer in the 80’s schlock slasher, Nightmare Beach. (That’s a compliment, fyi.)

What follows is an entertaining and engaging cross between Liquid Sky and After Hours, with Lincoln—played by the fabulous Babs Olusanmokun, who you may have seen crushing it on the starship Enterprise as Dr. M’Benga on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds—walking into one bizarre apartment after another. Olusanmokun is great here, bringing a performance that’s both funny and captivating.

I could easily see this getting developed into a feature, but they gotta keep Babs and they gotta keep the fantastic music by James William Blades (who had another film score in the festival this year in the narrative feature, Mutt). If the feature doesn’t become realized, I’m eager all the same for whatever Boyson does next.

*Three criminals who are about to take a really odd left-turn in* ***Claudio’s Song***

Claudio’s Song — Andreas Nilsson — 10 min. — UK

There’s a little bit of buzz going around for this one, but I can only imagine it’s due to the titular tune we hear in the final minutes of Andreas Nilsson’s Claudio’s Song, a true head scratcher that starts off pretty strong and then takes a surreal turn that I was left a bit puzzled by, which I suppose was the point, but meh.

Things start off on an interesting note: a couple of rough-looking fellas have kidnapped a paid influencer and are holding him in the trunk of their car. The criminals’ plan of extorting money from internet-famous people backfires when they fail to understand just what an influencer is and then… things get musical.

Nilsson, a trained painter and sculptor, constructs a world that seems like it could be ripped right out of any post-Tarantino crime movie playbook, which is all fine, and the notion of people kidnapping (what they believe to be) rich people off the internet is nefarious and interesting, but the way that this whole thing breaks down and gets weird, yeah, I dunno. The song sticks in your head for a few minutes after the film, but even that faded quicker than I expected.

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I should say there was one film in the program, AliEN0089, directed by Valeria Hoffman that actually looked really interesting, but for whatever reason wasn’t made available as part of the virtual presentation. As I’m writing this, it was just given the Short Film Special Jury Award, International. Perhaps now they’ll make it available for a few days online?

Overall, it was a solid program. Rarely do shorts programs bat a thousand, but I was genuinely pleased with the lineup here. Not all bangers, but interesting work. Keep your eyes peeled for places these shorts could pop up, like Short of the Week or as a Vimeo Staff Pick or something. Like I said, the ecosystem for shorts is a strange and confusing place, but there’s so much more going on in this corner of the filmmaking world than what you see get nominated for the three Oscar shorts prizes.

Keep your eyes peeled and see what you can find.