Short Film Showcase: Crestfallen

2011
Dir. Jeremiah Kipp

Director Jeremiah Kipp follows up his stark and unsettling brood-fest Contact – a Cronenbergian meditation on addiction and paranoia – with a similarly provocative short focusing on a young woman’s suicide bid and the myriad instances and thoughts that have led to it.

Much like the scene in The Rules of Attraction in which a young woman slips into death’s embrace by slitting her wrists in a warm bath, Crestfallen captures the painfully wrought moment in an abstract, lyrically beautiful way that, while poetic, doesn’t lessen the impact. An ethereal atmosphere is conjured with shards of sunlight streaming through a window into the darkened world of the woman (Deneen Melody). As the life bleeds out of her and swirls into the bathwater, we are privy to her equally swirling thoughts.

Unfolding as a series of disarming and striking images, Crestfallen is tentative in its observation of shattered dreams and submerges us deep within her trauma. While not strictly a ‘horror’ short, Kipp (who also worked as an assistant director on I Sell The Dead) still conveys the utter horror of a young woman’s life collapsing around her and the drastic measures she takes when she feels she has nothing left to live for. Through flashbacks we witness her discovery of her lover’s infidelity, catch glimpses of her childhood and see a little girl who could be her younger self or her daughter; the first in a series of visual shards that injects hope into proceedings.

Kipp deftly weaves the fragmented images together to form a narrative, and while he guides us through a devastatingly dark place, he at least shows us the glimmer of light ahead before leaving us, ensuring we end on a note enrobed with hope. Despite its brevity, Crestfallen packs a weighty punch and highlights Kipp as a filmmaker who wields the precision to cut straight to the heart of his subject matter in visually astounding ways that enhance the resonance of his work.