Geraldine
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
bob the moo
A security guard is alone in a deserted factory when a sudden power failure and a sighting of a figure on the CCTV, draws him out into the dark corridors.To be direct, this short film is one of a very a busy genre which is the time-loop device; it is one that can work very well but is hard to do since it is so familiar now, and increasingly popular in short films as a plot – indeed even this very week by coincidence I watch a short called Möbius which does the very same thing. To its credit, Rotor does deliver with good style; it is very stripped down, with very little dialogue and no time wasted in getting down to the business. As such it is punchy and has an engagingly dark aesthetic, so that it is dark but yet still clear – I am not a technical person but to me as a layman I do find that impressive, that a film can be dark but yet lit in the way so that we have good visibility without losing the sense of darkness.Anyway, the downside is that, even with this quick pace and short running time, the viewer will be way ahead of the narrative. Showing the coffee cup probably was a mistake, because it was too obvious what was happening, and the figure on the CCTV was far too obviously the same security guard. This means that we pretty much know what is coming, and the "reveal" of the multiple bodies also carries that familiar feel, perhaps not due to time-looping, but more to do with the film The Prestige. There is a question to be asked over which version of the guard killed the other one, however asking this exposes too many unknowns and questions which the stripped down short is not able to stand up to.It is delivered with style and it is punchy, but it is far too familiar in what it does and how it does it, and it loses a lot by the viewer being 3-4 minutes ahead of the film (which is a bigger problem when your film is only 6-7 minutes long).
