Foxes

Director Lorcan Finngan delivers a somber tale of isolation set in an abandoned suburban community. The young couple, Maria Ruane and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, are growing further apart as they try to stay financially afloat.

The setting and cinematography are fabulous, pulling you into suburbia and trapping you inside. The score is the main drive of this short and plays as its best character. The dialogue is minimal, leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks. This is far from perfect, but a fun little ride.

This connected with me a lot better than Vivarium, which was remade from this short. At a 16 minute runtime, there is no reason not to gives this little gem a watch.

'Foxes (2011)' is most successful when it comes to its atmosphere. The short drama-horror focuses on a woman who seems to be drawn to the foxes that hunt through her bins at night, to the increasing detriment of her already unsatisfying home life. It's a well-shot and well-edited affair with a professional aesthetic and, as I mentioned, a strong sense of atmosphere. Its narrative is a bit basic, though, and its payoff isn't as strong as it perhaps needed to be. Plus, its ambiguity feels less like a purposeful decision and more like the result of an uninspired scripting session. Nevertheless, this is a solidly entertaining short film. It's good, just not great. 6/10.

There is an awful lot going on in these 16 minutes. The cinematography is excellent, the acting solid, and the Gothic quality . . . well done. The film is jam-packed with very telling details . . . the husband's badge pinned to his dull workday uniform, the foxes at the garbage, the marks on the woman's body, the bits of landscape framing the row houses. The housing community is beyond monotonous--it's downright menacing in its straight-jacket sameness. There's an intensity that compels you to keep watching. The ending is a bit hokey for me, but the options were probably limited given the direction of the story. Certainly worth watching.

I didn't know anything about FOXES apart from a brief synopsis and concluded it was simply a tale about a long term relationship hitting the rocks . That is in effect what the story is all about , emotional isolation between a couple that is rapidly and irrevocably widening . There does seem to be a clash between screenwriter Garret Shanley and director Lorcan Finnegan and how they envisage the theme . Mr Finnegan seems to think a story of isolation is a bit too simplistic so he does something unexpected and creates a short film that is almost an apocalyptic horror movie . None of this should be taken as a negative criticism . We all know what it's like to become emotionally attached to someone and when we lose that person it is effectively the end of the universe . It's something of an achievement to the director and is very well done and brings more atmospheric gloom to a short film than say WORLD WAR Z and I AM LEGEND which cost tens of millions of dollars . Perhaps the best aspect is the rhythmically amorphous music which leads to a suffocatingly oppressive atmosphere . The director had me on the edge of my seat wondering if something full blown horror movie territory was about to happen . You might ask why the director felt the need to go down this stylistic road but it's so well done it'd be wrong to complain and does lead to a short film having a massive impact and I'd love to see this director do a 28 DAYS LATER type horror movie mixing horror and human drama

It was thanks to the Big Sur short film festival that I had the chance to see it. A lonely couple appears to be the only inhabitant of a vast new subdivision. The silence is deafening. Humans were not meant to live this way. Psychological malnourishment is their lot, thanks in part to overzealous builders in cahoots with myopic financiers.

There is no overt commentary on that political slant. But one can easily draw the conclusion. One drawback is a slightly too graphic depiction of amorous activity. I wonder why movies drifted away from off-camera suggestions, towards overt imagery. It seemed so much more tasteful in the classics.