The concept of 'Origin' is refreshing. It dallies with horror in the underpinnings of its narrative, that story beat that launches the story. But there's no twist here, no jump scare, no further employment of genre trappings beyond the makeup used to visualize the progression of a character's condition. This takes a very different approach to notions that have served as the basis for countless tales. Instead of wanting to shock or frighten the viewer with startling scenes of dark portent, 'Origin' explores the struggle to understand and grapple with the meaning and ramifications of a grim event. This is about the drama that unfolds after the horror, and it's an outstanding idea I would love to see developed further.
It's unfortunate that the execution in 'Origin' doesn't truly impart the gravity it wants to. Writer-director Danny Stack is to be commended for the unconventional slant here. Yet his screenplay feels less like a solid, cohesive narrative, and more like a series of snapshots. Static scenes are disallowed from breathing on their own, and characters are frozen in time, unable to flourish. Likewise, his direction seems stilted and sluggish: relationships and interactions between characters - loving family members - feel reluctant and unnatural. Those interactions feel pointedly inorganic in a way that suggests the fault of not the roles as written, not the performances of the cast inherently, but the instruction imparted to the cast by the person behind the camera. It's hard to truly engage with the short when its constituent parts aren't truly engaged with each other.
'Origin' isn't bad. But this is, in my mind, an example of swell imagination held back by limited capability.
