Director: Nick Vorsselman
Writer: Nick Vorsselman
Cast: Albert van Benthem, Kyra Antoni
Running time: 15mins
In many ways, Contac T will prove a divisive watch. Not so much due to its content – although, it does need to come with a warning that it depicts self-harm – but perhaps more about its intentionality.
The film works on many levels, most notably its intriguing aesthetic. It looks, sounds, feels like a made-for-TV supernatural thriller from the 1980s – and in the best possible way. There is professional polish in every shot, but at the same time, everything feels a little washed out, drained of the over-the-top vibrancy many films of the time had. And given the story, which follows a man losing grip on reality after the tragic loss of his wife, and daughter, that seems appropriate.
Indeed, the framing and editing both live up to the standards we might demand from a regular movie – but the scene is always just a little bit further away than we might usually expect. There is just a little bit more of the bare walls in the house Daan (Albert van Benthem) is vacating. The sound reverberates around the building’s empty corners; in a way we’re used to seeing smoothed out in post. And the handheld camera is never still – its edges reverberating with nervous energy, even in the most run-of-the-mill of contexts. It’s uncanny, it’s unnerving, it feels like it is cuing us for some deeply unsettling occurrences as Daan processes his grief.
Van Benthem’s central performance contributes to this further – however off-kilter as his surroundings are, however eerily shy of being lifelike everything is, our lead grounds us in a raw, unfiltered sense of grief. It is this juxtaposition – between the sense of unease we get from surroundings that are familiar but somehow surreal, and the very real sense of empathy we can’t help but foster for Daan – which make this a genuinely moving, and disturbing short.
The problem is, director Nick Vorsselman’s script lacks the patience and the subtlety to make the most of that. From the final conversation Daan has with his ill-fated daughter Laura (Kyra Antoni, who is not given nearly enough to get her own character across with), to the placing of flowers on her resting place, the plot gallops past at a racing pace – seemingly eager to get to the moment when things really start to fall apart for Daan’s psyche. But in doing so, the impact the events have on us as an audience are muted, and there is too little time for us to live with Daan in a normal day, to fully appreciate his deterioration.
There is no time to explore the precious moments he has lost touch with – beyond a hastily delivered ‘memory’ delivered as a piece of ADR, without visuals. And that unceremonious dumping of emotional exposition on us just feels careless. While there might not have been the time or budget to show us a carousel of beloved family images, productions can still find the effort to deliver this sort of thing in a more imaginative, evocative way (see Jim’s brief, flickering memory of his parents in 28 Days Later, where the imagery briefly resembles flickering home movie footage – showing us a window into his former happiness without having to leave the kitchen the character is already standing in).
Possibly the greatest shame of all in this regard, is that when the psychological/supernatural (it’s for us to decide I suppose) element of a phone-call from the Great Beyond arrives, it somehow feels both obvious, and underdeveloped. There was time to establish this idea somewhere earlier in the conversations between father and daughter. There was time to build up some sense of uncertainty or dread about the reasons or intent behind such a phenomenon. And there was time to toy with the audience more, moving us from fear, to hope, to desolation. But those opportunities were passed up, for whatever reason, to the film’s detriment.
Sometimes being cliché is fine, as long as it is feels earned. As long as we can feel the results stem from the ebb and flow of a story that resonates with us, we can still buy into the obvious. But here, we arrive at the end of all things with not nearly enough build-up.
And that ultimately brings us back to what was or wasn’t intentional, which is a shame. Because I’d love to believe that the film’s overall vibe was on purpose, that this is really the result of someone putting time and effort into evoking the vibe of A Ghost Story for Christmas during its 1980s run, or something similar. But the carelessness with which so much of the story breezes by; the lack of attention to detail, or effort to come up with creative ways to embellish on an all too straightforward narrative; suggest to me that I may be finding things I want to like about this movie, but which might not really be there.
