Splinter

At first glance, John’s (Bill Fellows) home might look inviting. It’s neat and clean and the Christmas tree is up, as if it’s just waiting to be filled up with laughter and good cheer. But the light streaming in around the edges of the closed curtains is warm and bright, not the light of winter. Time has stopped; life has gone out of this house. Struggling to come to terms with it all, John repeats the same daily routine, as separate from the rest of the world as he can make himself, waiting for something to change. What he most needs to face is what he finds hardest to think about.

This may sound like a recipe for a dull film, and its a slow burn, but Fellows is a good enough actor to hold viewers’ attention as elements of the mystery surrounding him gradually slot into place. Director David Bryant has to sense to keep the exposition as light as he can, even when John is talking with his psychiatrist (Jane Asher), who visits him at home but is trying to persuade him to let more light in or make moves towards venturing outside. The weight of John’s depression creates its own tension, its own sense of conflict, and the film is at its strongest in these early stages. Later, when more complex mental health problems emerge and Bryant raises the stakes, the film loses some of its credibility, but it’s still an impressive effort.

Made on a very low budget and short in Bryant’s own home, this looks nothing like what you might expect. It’s an extraordinarily polished piece of work, with the production values one might expect of a major studio. Sound recording is a particular challenge for small productions but one wouldn’t know it from this. There’s judicious use of quietness, with the viewer’s attention drawn to small sounds like running water, soft footsteps, muffled sobs. The lighting is carefully balanced and atmospheric, even in difficult spaces like the bathroom (where reflections frequently catch inexperienced filmmakers off guard). This quality of work means that when something jars – when we glimpse John through a smeared lens or a small movement suggests another figure just on the edge of our vision – we know it’s intentional.

Is John being haunted? Almost certainly – but whether it’s supernatural or purely psychological is open to question. We know early on that he’s hiding something – he lies about taking his medication – but we don’t know how much he’s hiding from himself. Whilst genre fans won’t take long to figure out the central arc of the plot, the character journey still carries some weight. Visits from neighbours are so starkly at odds with the mood of the rest of the film that it’s easy to see why the outside world has become intimidating to John, and might make us question why some behaviours are accepted as normal when others are not. Sadly the cruder aspects of John’s breakdown are not as successful.

Despite its flaws, there’s so much impressive work here that the film stands up pretty well amongst similar online genre fare, and it should certainly encourage producers and investors to take an interest in Bryant.