Kookie

There are many things to love about the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. The films, the crowds, the electricity in the air. But one thing that I look forward to more than most are the Canadian short films that are shown before each feature.

The appeal to me about the shorts is that you generally have no information about the shorts prior to their illumination on the screen. There are no online trailers months in advance, no big red carpet ceremonies to roll them out. We can simply sit back in our theatre chair and await the creativity juices to flow from the projector lens.

Up first at this year's Festival is Kookie, a short that is worthy of our attention. Written, directed and conceived in just a few weeks by Justin Harding, Kookie stars Ava Jamieson as Bree, a 9-year-old child with a penchant for eating cookies from the cookie jar then lying about her involvement.

But Bree's attraction to the cookie jar is put to the test when her mother replaces the usual cutesy bear ceramic with a terrifying clown face jar. Bree must then approach a devilishly evil looking jar if she is to keep her insatiable urge for the sweets in order.

What transpires over the full 13-minutes of the short we will leave to your viewing pleasure but we will report that if you have a fear of clowns – something that is ever present in today's news headlines – then Kookie might be the short of nightmares.

There is so much to enjoy in Hastings vision. The cookie jar itself is as downright frightening as any live killer we've seen a horror film this year. But it was the camera work in this short effort that really got our attention. The lighting, framing and focus points were all the work of a master. We are not accustomed to such professional looking imagery on the screen when a filmmaker utilizes a budget likely less than the average person's credit card limit.

All this makes Kookie one of our favorite shorts to even show at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. And that is high praise.

A precocious little girl with a peculiar taste in very old horror movies and a bad habit of eating too many cookies from the cutesy porcelain bear cookie jar and then lying about it, makes the mistake of sneaking one out of the new horrifying clown-faced cookie jar that her mother got to try and scare her out of eating too much junk food as well as being a little liar, and soon after little Bree finds herself haunted by the terrifying spirit of the jar, as personified by a monstrous grinning clown that intends to keep her company for a long time! So what I loved the best about this short was the quirky performance of young Ava Jamieson as Bree, she was really cool and funny and unlike most child actors where they are kind of annoying and just there, she comes off like a real character who just happens to be a kid, and for me she really made the whole short work and gave it a bit of a dark comedic tone - a babysitter gets creeped out and a child may be going a little crazy under a malign ghost clown's influence, but it's not at all a grim and nasty type of horror short, in fact I found it bizarrely upbeat! No one dies and there is no gore, and I don't reckon anything bad was going to happen to Bree...as long as she stayed good! They did a damn good job on the design of the jar though, it was seriously creepy-looking, I wouldn't have been able to stand that devilish clown face glaring daggers at me all day, that'd be liable to put anyone off of their cookies for good!! This is a good solid horror comedy short that is very slickly presented, it had a good child actress in it, it wasn't a total downer, and what it lacks in the kind of gory punchline that you will usually get at the end of these kinds of horror shorts, it makes up for with a great sense of spooky fun! So worth checking out and just very well done! 💀 🍪 💀

Its not total garbage and has a good ending but the central characters could do better

Seductive contrast between blonde, angelic Bree and the new cookies jar is the axis of this special short horror. A dishonest girl, a new jar, her mother and the fear who becomes something real creepy, almost form of attachment . The young actress is amazing and the story is perfect. The essence - to destroy represents to call. Many horrors give this message. "Kookie" has the virtue to transform it in more than convincing one.