As a browse of IMDb will tell you, I watch a lot of short films and am a big fan of them as a point for creatives who have more freedom to explore and take risks with what they want to do. This is not to say that I am often in step with what others thing and, whether right or wrong, Growth was one such short film where SXSW, Vimeo, and any other community of "in crowd" seemed to adore it, whereas I struggled to even keep it playing till the end. The documentary looks at the subject of growing and growing older and it does it with a top-down view. This view produces some very sharp and beautiful images, but I am not sure it really does much for the subject. I read that the director did it because he felt that all growth had a similar pattern when viewed from above (the spread of crystals, cities, organisms, movement of people). In a way I guess this is true, but not many of these images really deliver on that idea.
What we get over the images is contributions from all various ages, starting with children, through teens and into adults. Some of these are insightful in the way they connect but yet also open the viewer up to think bigger, however the majority fell flat for me. It didn't help that the children and teens go first, because it does open with "kids say the funniest things" and also teens doing the short documentary equivalent of bad poetry – saying stuff they think is profound but is really pretty banal. This tone continues more or less, and in the end the film's final shots of people on their backs looking up to a camera all felt like it had stumbled over the fine line between beauty and pretension.
If it catches you in the right state of mind or at the right point in your life, maybe this is the most beautiful moving thing you have ever seen, but for me it was technically impressive but without any of the heart that it thinks it has.
