Caronte is the Italian, Portuguese and Spanish name of Charon, the boatman of Hades, who appears in numerous versions of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. It's also the name of a computer game being played by Debbie's younger brother Nicholas in the real world: it's the name of the fighter spacecraft the computer character Lieutenant Arsys commandeers with which she escapes an alien space battleship and flees home while fighting off the full force of the alien space fleet. Debbie is the stereotypical sullen, peevish, self-involved adolescent: concerned only about herself, her cell phone, and her social media. She is especially rude to her younger brother Nicholas, whom she sees as nothing but a nuisance, and in fact this is not surprising, because Nicholas IS an annoying little twerp. He is constantly making weirdly superstitious statements like, "If I can cross the street while stepping only on the white lines, we'll have chips for dinner," or, "If I can score 3 times in a row, you'll automatically pass." No 11-year-old I've ever known, including myself, acts like that. It's a plot contrivance, and not a felicitous one. The irksome Nicholas takes the game wherever he goes, including the back seat of a moving car, where Debbie rudely rebuffs Nicholas's plea for help finishing the game, which leads to the last (and crucial) annoying superstitious remark: "If I can finish these last two levels before the sun goes down, Debbie will always be with me." Again: what normal 11-year-old boy says things like that? (In fact, the sun already IS down, but we'll skip over that.) But it's the bit of dialogue that motivates the final part of the plot, because after Debbie is left the only survivor of a disastrous automobile accident, she feels bitter remorse at the way she took her family and her brother for granted.
So "Caronte" is the interweaving of two stories: The real world of Debbie and Nicholas, and the computer-game world of "Caronte." It's a great idea, but its execution falls short. The Arsys sequences are fantastic, but they lose quite a bit of their excitement by being intercut with the distractingly slow pace of the real-world scenes. When the computer-game scenes are viewed by themselves, with the Debbie-and-Nicholas scenes cut out, they are absolutely spectacular, much more so than when they are interrupted by the real-world story. The idea here, obviously, is to contrast the two stories by meaningfully alternating between them, but each story does not provide the best counterpoint to the other story.
This short is definitely worth watching (on YouTube), but despite all the fireworks and the skill that went into making it, it is just not quite satisfying. Still, I would love to see the Arsys story fleshed out into a full-length film. The juxtaposing-contrast plot of the short, I think, would be extremely difficult to develop to feature-film length.
(Note: Melina Matthews, who plays Arsys, is Spanish but speaks perfect British English because her father is Welsh. Everyone else speaks perfect American English, so you'd think that the film was made in the States, but in fact it was made in Spain, where the Lardner kids, who play Debbie and Nicholas, also live.)
