Welcome to “Your Weekly Short,” a LakeFrontRow.com feature that showcases one short from a Wisconsin filmmaker each week, every week. Brace thy face.
Answers carry little weight in Zach McLain’s “Olivia” because the Green Bay-based director is all about questions, and that intrigue leads to plenty of riches. Carpenter Michael McDugan (John Glowacki) awakes on someone else’s kitchen table to find his hands and mouth covered in blood and his friend Olivia (Olivia Gonzales) nowhere in sight. Michael’s next five minutes are both frantic and mesmerizing as he sprints and stumbles his way to the truth.
Some of the truth, anyway. “Olivia” is high on ratcheting up tension and low on nearly everything else, and that strategy has definite advantages inside a short film’s strictures. Writer Crystal Hampton smartly omits details, and in the case of Michael’s coming-to, omits outright context. The dazed carpenter’s gradual recollection feels like a return to reality from short-term amnesia. Fresh blood stains on a contract call back to some sort of business deal and a large hammer is revealed to be a deadly re-negotiator. McLain’s dynamic camera propels the unraveling mystery forward with vibrant angles, peeking over a rooftop or rising up above a kitchen table; it’s a voyeurism that keeps pace with Michael’s frenzied confusion.
McLain traffics in style with “Olivia,” and when Kara Horswill’s character makes an impromptu appearance, Michael’s world slows to a crawl, and a mundane conversation on the doorstep becomes visually chopped and screwed. Gradual flashbacks look tremendous in crisp black and white, and the 10 hours Ryan Blomquist apparently spent editing pay dividends in the somnambulant results. For all of its panache, “Olivia” doesn’t amount to much. We never learn why there’s blood on Michael’s mouth nor what exactly he was doing there to begin with. But its final image leaves a brutally arresting feeling. That seems to have been the point all along.