Mörkret faller

Well where can i begin with Darkness Falls, this short science-fiction thriller movie has some of the most gorgeous opening credits i have ever seen in an opening of a movie, with wonderfully shot beautiful snowy locations.

There is some excellent camera work in Darkness Falls, some strong cinematography and clear visuals. That it is hard to believe it was filmed by two crew people including the director.

The film starts off with a young woman called Melissa waking up in a forest; unaware of how she got there or who she even is. Is this real or a nightmare, or is she in another world? You have to watch the film to decide for yourself.

Some of the things that happen are never fully explained but the performances are very good and the film moves along at a steady pace. There is some fantastic camera work in Darkness Falls, and some great cinematography with great visuals.

This short movie is better than some of the Hollywood films that are out there. I would love to see what the director could do with a large budget and make this film into a feature length movie.

Darkness Falls is a great little film that is worth watching and Jarno Lee Vinsencius not only directed this great short film, but he produced it, edited and wrote it, and was also the cinematographer. Jarno Lee you should be in Hollywood, you are a genius in making films..

I don't usually review short films, because there is seldom an occasion for me to watch them. Especially 15 minute shorts… Especially 15 minute shorts with complex science fiction themes. So I have very little context, except for when I was in film school. But even my student 16mm film from 1986, which was also a complex sci-fi horror, was 30 minutes. To be fair, my film was MOS because there was too much demand on the school's Nagra and I barely had the money to print the film as it was… And my actors were just film students not real actors. But still, using my film as a basis of comparison, the cinematography of DARKNESS FALLS blows it out of the water so far it leaves orbit.

The beautiful opening shots of the winter forest were so nice, especially the flyover. And there were other moments that revealed a good instinct for how a camera's field of view can be leveraged to build anxiety.

DARKNESS FALLS is trying to convey a lot of information in a short span of time, but Swedish director Jarno Lee Vinsencius centralized that info-transfer on particular dialog scenes and lingered in silence on other scenes in order to mount tension and work on the character of Melissa. (More on her in a moment.) In fact, the mental pacing of the film accelerates from start to finish, compelling you to want to speed up the first half and slow down the second half. I think this is a natural consequence of having 15 minutes to tell a story with multiple objectives: to set a mood and introduce an askew character (the first half) and to deliver a situational back-story and final conflict (the second half), ending with a dramatic impact. But maybe it was also partially because the language is foreign to me, and I had to quickly digest English subtitles loaded with curious background information.

As you take this journey with Melissa you wonder, "What happened?" Then you wonder, "What is happening?" That leads to, "What is going to happen?" Which brings you crashing back to, "What the heck just happened?" There were shots that seemed to stare at Melissa with no action at all, and momentarily it reminded me of UNDER THE SKIN (a film which took that style to an extreme that had me wondering if the projector froze up). But Vinsencius is doing this on purpose, because there is something going on the background he wants you to see. Or to be more accurate: something he wants you to *think* you see. This makes Melissa seem vulnerable, and that generates empathy.

This empathy begs us to trust her, though, and that's where it gets clever. Actress Joanna Häggblom and Vinsencius seem to be conspiring to make you conflicted about Melissa, and not know why. It's not so much about what we see of her tale, or how she behaves… It's more about what we don't see, and how she doesn't behave.

This is a girl with amnesia, awakening in the woods with no idea how she got there. But soon thereafter she finds her way to a town and manages to rent a hotel room. We were not permitted to see that transaction. She did not even know who she was at this point, but I would have imagined she'd have found identification like a driver's license or a credit card in her overcoat. We weren't allowed to see her investigate, or call the police. Strange… So let's suppose she paid in cash and had no identification on her person and felt too frightened to call the authorities… And we move on… After the main title, we have jumped forward in time (we're not sure how far), and we see that she's paid for psychotherapy also, is living in an apartment, and apparently knows her name. So we are led to believe that some memory is coming back to her, but we are again troubled with questions. How can one have an apartment without having friends and family call or visit who would give more clues as to how she ended up in the woods? Did she not have any calendar or other means to track her schedule? Is she unemployed? If so, where's her money coming from? There was very little time in the story to address these questions, to be sure. But even a rapid montage would have covered plenty of ground. The filmmaker chose to skip certain details that would have allowed the audience to understand Melissa better, and I found that suspicious.

When the character of David is introduced, it gets weirder, especially because she seems to trust his absurd stories and even runs off with him very suddenly to the middle of nowhere. Brave girl, as I would have been afraid he may be the very person responsible for whatever "trauma" caused her amnesia and put her out into the woods like that. But she was going along with his story quite readily. Was she driven by a subconscious motivation? Some kind of subliminal programming planted in her mind? You watch and decide.

All in all, comparing this film to others of its kind, I would grade the direction with a B+, the producing and cinematography with an A+, the writing and sound with about a C+, and the acting ranging from C to B+ depending on the character. Mr. Vinsencius is clearly talented, but his persistence is what will really pay off. I hope he is able to keep up the good work!

A young woman, Melissa, wakes up to find herself alone in a forest. She has a strange feeling that she is being watched. Back at home, she is struggling to sleep. Then a man, David, approaches her - he knows what is behind all this. Furthermore, her life is in danger.

Good, intriguing, clever short. Good plot development, especially for a short. The problem with shorts is that you don't have enough time to fully sketch the background and any plot development comes in a rush. Writer-director Jarno Lee Vinsencius largely gets round this problem by providing the information through dialogue and visual clues and forcing the viewer's mind to fill in the gaps.

Good build up of intrigue and tension in a short space of time. The basic plot is good enough for a feature film - 15 minutes is too short a film for something that interesting.

Not perfect though. Some of the acting is a bit hammy at times, especially towards the end. The camera angles and editing of some scenes were a bit off-putting too.

I didn't know what to expect during my viewing of this short film. Darkness Falls is an interesting short film about something mysterious.

Once the opening credits appeared, I was hooked. The music and the cinematography in this film is fantastic.

The plot is mysterious. I had no idea where the story was going to go, but I did take a guess about six minutes into the film, and my guess was current.

I thought the performances from the actors were okay (believable). Joanna Häggblom's and Demis Tzivis's characters seemed a little dead- faced to me, I didn't know if they were supposed to portray emotions or not, but they didn't, and so they looked dead to me.

Overall, I enjoyed this film for the most part. Darkness Falls is an interesting film that has great cinematography and a mysterious plot. Darkness Falls will hold your attention till the very end.

Final Grade: B

Very occasionally I review short films, since I got an opportunity to see this, I have my reasons to write one for it. This is a Swedish sci-fi-thriller from who seems has a lot of experience in making short films. He's definitely a multi-talented, especially from the technical area who edits, handles the camera, writes, produces and ultimately dons in the director's hat. So I liked this film, but not entirely and what those I enjoyed and those I didn't can be read in the below paragraphs.

You know, short films are for the beginners. I too had worked for a couple of them since I'm an animator and interested in filmmaking. Without the proper source like tools and decent actors, especially without a maximum push from post-production, it would go straight to the garbage. Because nobody watches the short films, if it is not for fun, it takes just one good joke to impress the viewers. That's why lots of short films are comedy, especially animation. And those who watch non-fun genre short films, they expect cleverness in them like twist and turns. So it is a tough job to make a film that liked by everyone, but this filmmaker did his best.

The film was about a young woman who wakes up in the woods without a memory of where she's and how she got there. Followed by consulting with an expert, a stranger offers to help to clear her doubts and what comes is the peak of the film where everything she wanted to know and you would be revealed.

The first thing anybody who watched it would say the photography was amazing. I loved it, especially the angles. I think they have used drones for a couple of shots. The locations were beautiful too in its limited outdoor adventure. Overall, technically the film sounds great. Obviously, in a short film it is always a minimal cast and so did this one. But they all were good, especially the one who played the character Melissa. Anyway, nobody gets the chance to give their full potential in this kind of short run.

Let's talk about the story, which I find quite familiar. I think it was a decent up until the last scene, especially the twist which is what we see in all the films when the writers ran out of the fresh idea and who uses this one. Of course you would predict it earlier itself, but due to overall film was short, it would create a doubt what you just saw. I can't blame anybody for it, because the film lacks development, neither story nor its characters, and you will be a fool to expect that in a short film where the majority of the film trying to conclude the tale since the first minute.

Like I said in my many reviews, every filmmaker and stars want to jump into a sci-fi franchise. That's the current filmmaking trend, because of the CGI revolution. This one was a simple story, involving no graphics, but a sci-fi that has the alien connection. The overall effort must be appreciated. I haven't seen the other films of this filmmaker, but he has the ability to pull the feature films at top level. What he needs is a fine screenplay and the actors and obvious the supportive production house. Other than that I have faith in his technical skills, so let's hope he makes one in the near future and I'll come back here to write a review.

7/10