Cariño

The credits unfold over what one could call a driver's landscape. A sun-bleached Triumph motorcycle, a gentleman of a certain age - hills and scrub, winding concrete curves, the sun and the mountain air. It could be an advertisment, or a motoring programme desperately trying to pretend that it is not one, and then there is a bleeding man in a tattered sun-dress.

Call it shortsploitation, because I will, reckless and quick - visceral stuff this, back-woods and isolated, gory and horrifying. Sharp intakes of breath, nervous laughter. In Q&A, director Shaun Hughes talked about wanting the film to feel like it was set in the Seventies, without explicitly saying so - it's got many of the right trappings, the colour palette is of that spaghetti/paella western mode, the opening credit sequence, the vehicles. We could digress into the relative state of them - no motorcar or motorcycle of an era has the kind of concours corona that isolates survivors, but that's pedantry. When a nail is driven through a foot it appears that a nail is driven through a foot - when blood pumps to the beat of a ragged pulse and drips, drips, drips from a beaten brow it's with a genuine warmth.

Shaun Hughes direction is assured, comfortable on winding curves and in lovestruck shanties. Tim Courtney's music, from lilting Spanish guitar over a man's love affair with a road, then, eventually, ragged keyboard-thumping discord. There's one of those oscilloscope-punishing tones at the start, de rigeur for short shockers, but we'll give it a pass because this amounts to cyclical genre homage. There's a brilliant moment of headless composition, a party stumbling across the frame, a brief moment of contemplation if not respite in the middle of a breathless plunge.

Julian Lee is 'the Rider', but his increasingly haggard countenance doesn't match that of Bhasker Patel's "old man". The rest of the cast are good too, but to give away their identity or number is to spoil the nature of the film's surprise. It's not a pretty story - indeed it's a more than bleak one, built from an idea put together by Lee and Hughes but given detail and colour in its downhill plunge by no small measure of other suns flickering across other sun-dresses.

Cariño means 'darling', and this was certainly an audience favourite at Glasgow's 2013 Short Film Festival. It might also become a favourite of yours - and if it doesn't, well, the beauty of short film is that there's always another one along later.