In The Soil

The key question is "for something in particular?", because the answer is at once and is not 'no'. Casper Rudolf Emil Kjeldsen's film is as dark as the soil at the bottom of the hole Kjeld chooses to dig in the corner. What light there is distorted, as red as the bloody fluorescent in the garage workshop.

Digging deep into cinema's treasures, there are moments that rely on ominous strings from Andreas Kildedal Westmark's score, from the trickles of water and worry from Maar Falke Dollerup's sound. Through it all Tobias Scavenius' camera makes something of the shadows, a solidity of the absence of light. The colours are not so much muted as weary, a tired green, lank hair, worn cloth, stretched skin.

Kjeld's digging is square edged and regular, marked off and measured. It's rightness is itself a wrongness, its geometric certainty as solid as the inevitable progress of light from source to skin to mirror to lens. Solid yellows. Sickly reds. The sunshine seems a thing made of dust, as if it draws its colour from the withered plants and not the other way around.

A single circular sweep gives us enough steps of a process to make its ending visceral. We had opened with the suggestion of a face within the soil but the ending will be shrouded with different marks. Of quality, certainly, this is a haunting piece. Not quite of folk, but certainly of family horror. As Kjeld completes his labours daughter Karoline looks on. Each is not alone, though they may well be.

Screened at the fifteenth edition of Glasgow's Short Film Festival as part of regular horror-inflected programme Scared Shortless, it was in good company. With something so rooted in the domestic viewers who (like your reviewer) took advantage of online screenings had an additional bit of the uncanny to add to it. Seeing a man in his own house lit by a strange glow gets a bit more personal when the screen goes to black and one sees oneself reflected.

It is not just in vision that there is quality. Sandra Guldberg Kampp and Thomas Guldberg Madsen as daughter and father provide performances inflected and infected with each other, with the environment. Maar Falke Dollerup's sound delivers many of the most impactful moments. There are many films where looking away gives us space to imagine but I was in particular minded of Brian M Ferguson's Flamingo, previously programmed at GSFF.

The Danish title is Det Er I Jorden or 'it is in the ground', and by either title there is a sense of things buried. One that starts with the shape that opens and closes the film, one that sets out the stakes as firmly as anything else within the events bracketed by those pareidoliac earthen parentheses. The boundaries of the story are similarly defined, a house, a garden, enough of a road to constitute an address. One can look across the lake, see the sky. That is not the direction of travel, of what matters. Look down. Dig deep. Look deep. Dig down.