Name: Dormant
Genre: Short, Horror
Released: 2024-10-12
Duration: 9 min
Rating: 6.5
Cast: Anneke Sluiters, Joris Smit

A beautiful, haunting, emotional indie horror short

Screening from Black Friday Film Festival, Friday 30th January.

This haunting short from director Niels Bourgonje was a wonderful experience. We see a man wake alone, a familiar beeping of a life support machine in the background. We discover his wife is lying dormant in the next room and see him tend to her needs, washing and caring for her bedsores. He even places headphones over her ears, playing a love song as he looks after her.

Then from nowhere the story flips into a nightmare. He receives a text and it's clear he's cheated. Racked with guilt, his dreams are laced with terrifying imagery and wakes to hear the machine's dutiful beeps have hastened in pace. He races to see what's happened and makes a shocking discovery.

With a runtime of just 9 minutes, this short successfully triggers a variety of strong emotions including compassion, guilt and fear. The biggest of all is doubt - do we ever truly know another person, in particular those we trust to build a life with.

The imagery in this short is wonderful with the cinematography from Michel Rosendaal perfectly encapsulates the raw emotion Niels Bourgonje imagined as writer, director and producer.

Joris Smit and Anneke Sluiters are mesmerising. To carry a story with just two characters in a single shot location is incredibly difficult, yet it's executed expertly here.

I for one am a fan of this short and cannot wait to see what's next for all involved.

Dutch cinema often combines understated realism with offbeat humor, tackling moral ambiguity and social change. It balances intimate storytelling with bold, sometimes provocative, visual styles. Dutch films combine art-house sensibility with grounded storytelling, reflecting the country's open, yet quietly complex culture.

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The horror genre features stories that aim to elicit fear, suspense, and a sense of dread in its audience. Horror stories often explore themes related to the unknown, the supernatural, and the macabre, and they frequently evoke strong emotional reactions such as anxiety, terror, and unease.

The short form refers to creative works characterized by their brevity and concise storytelling. Unlike full-length feature films, short films have a running time of less than 45 minutes, while TV shorts have a running time of less than 22 minutes.

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A man (Smit) cares for his comatose wife (Sluiters) at home. He fears something dark has awakened in her when he cheated.

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Dormant

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