Ganef

Writer/director Mark Rosenblatt may have built his career so far largely in theatre but he fully embraces the potential of film in this short film - his first to be based on his own original story after adapting both Shakespeare and, at feature length, Making Noise Quietly.

He firmly establishes his child's eye perspective of this moneyed corner of Sixties London as we join little Ruthie (izabella Dziewanska) as she spins herself dizzy, the chandelier of her home appearing to speed round faster and faster as she twirls beneath it. Ruthie likes games, especially the one where the family maid and nanny Lynn (Sophie McShera) freezes at the sound of the shake of a jar before turning into a monster.

Imagination can be a powerful thing in the under-10s though, especially when it is being fed by an adult who doesn't realise the impact of what they are saying. Ruthie's mum Mrs Hirth (Lydia Wilson) doesn't mean to give her daughter ideas when she recalls the trauma of the war and a soldier, who she refers to as a "ganef" - a thief - taking her things, but children are porous and Ruthie soaks it right up.

Rosenblat - who drew on his own family's experience of the Holocaust for the story - shows how this tiny shift in Ruthie's perspective has big implications for the whole household, simply but effectively exploring all the subtle but ongoing traumas that many experienced in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The family microcosm is handsomely realised, from the production design to the camerawork from Alana Mejia Gonzalez, who imbues the house with a slightly dusty air. McShera, who knows a thing or two about playing maids after her role as Daisy in Downton Abbey, lets Lynn's emotions ripple below the surface - from curiosity to confusion to hurt. At the film's heart, Dziewanska is perfectly cast as Ruthie, directed so that her natural energy leaps from the screen but also able to capture how children easily pick up on the energy of others in ways that can make them move quickly between opposing emotions. It is testimony to Rosenblat's storytelling that this is the sort of short that you feel as though there should be considerably more of, as it ends rather abruptly, as though it too has frozen at the midpoint of its game. Hopefully he'll get to bring his strong ideas to a longer form soon.