Coins

Coins is made of proximity, tactility, the press of flesh on cupronickel visited in extended sequences that make the visceral of the numismatic. The drums' in the background might be whisked or whispered but they and the bathroom muzak are at a remove, an angle. One that's enough to impart motion to a round object placed upon it, to turn potential into headlong energy.

This is made of discomfort, the scrapes not just of sticks on percussive skins but over counters, of angles, of the closeness of skin. It is a dizzying thing, Nicole Huminski's direction of Maya Duftschmid's script is not so much horror as nausea, a striking and terrifying pice of reactive revulsion screened at 2022's Glasgow Short Film Festival as part of Scared Shortless. While not the only film in the programme to make a virtue of the viscerally vile, it's unique in its focus. There are sequences that might be closest to Ant-Man, not just the micro made macro but recollections that recall the recitations of Luis, though here the doublings are of doubloons. Parasitic rather than piratical, however.

From all sorts of small pieces of craft, angles so Dutch they seem from the pitching deck of a ghost ship, score, performance, makeup effects, even a licking that would take Nicolas Cage back to Monaco in 2002 this creates a proper sense of unease. It's original title is not 'Coins' but Drecks Kleingeld. That's not just the element of change, but something like dirty (petty) cash. That dirt not just on hands and stamped faces, on floors, counters, in sinks, in the imagination. Like a handful of smash it makes something both of repetition and variation, finding in the deviations of detail room to gross-out, to grow, to insidiously infect. Lucre has rarely been filthier, though here the taint is of the streets, of the quotidian, not the moral lows of high finance but biological business. From hand to mouth.

The film has a small cast, just Magdelan Laubish and Joel Olano, but it is a film that takes all its value from the small. The close, the too close, the claustrophobic. The texture of proceedings is headlong, the passage of penny from pocket to pocket is infectious in its intensity. At every interaction the possibility of gleam is replaced with the certainty of grime, an amalgamation of elements that leaves one with an unalloyed understanding of our protagonist's dread of that drecks kleingeld.

There's some brilliant technical work here, the foley of Philip Hutter and Andreas Goldbrunner is something to smack your lips over, to clap hand to mouth and over ears, to wash in the hope that a different wetness will sluice the slime from disturbed digits. This is a third feature for Duftschmid as writer and a debut for Huminski, for all involved though it is indicative of talent.

While many films seek horror in the failings of larger systems, religion, reality, there's something perhaps more disturbing in examining small things so closely enough that they can be seen to be broken, as an effort that adds to to those this is something to note.