Siren

Siren draws from its namesake. Not the temptresses of the Mediterranean but their warning descendant, that looping scream of wariness, the sine wave of menace. The Doppler spiral of danger or deliverance.

It opens with another, the staircase of building 109, its three-sided form abstracted by angle into something trying to be nothing. Or, indeed, the reverse.

Screening as part of the 2022 Taiwan Film Festival in Edinburgh, Siren is part of a multinational shorts programme. The film is subtitled from Arabic and Japanese and from that juxtaposition it draws compelling tension. Director Nobuyuki Miyake has a history in television advertising and this bears some of that immediacy. They've worked three times with writer Maki Arai, this their most recent collaboration from 2017.

We bounce back and forth in time from "That Day". "382 Days Ago", "48...", "363", and 14 and 245 and 2 and 120 and 3 minutes and "18615 Days...". That's 51 years without any change, but if we aren't to have lost the Februarys 29th then it should be 11 higher (what with the millenium, else it'd be 12).

Our looping is around the late Masahiko Tsugawa's Mr Toyoshige and a man named Abbas (Hami Mehri Shirmard) in what could hit the stage as a tight two-hander. This was one of Tsugawa's last roles, in a career that had nearly 300. There's a lot done with context, overheard radio, muffled audio, and more done with recontextualisation. From the off we've got an odd perspective, and the film keeps us to it. From the tale with the sirens comes that early warning, a black flag might have no meaning beneath it. So too a knock, a bruise, a knife.

For all its intent to sharpness, Siren is perhaps a little too blunt in its spread. It's charming enough, and its gyring chronology shows real ambition, but its edge is dulled not so much by its quality as its competition. There's a sense from the start that all is not as it seems and while its creation of seeming is sometimes strong the suspicions it creates are sometimes crisp-packet thin. It is not without charm, but sweetness without sharpness can be cloying and for all that its performers carry it well it draws only a muted reaction.