LA SHORTS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2026 REVIEW! Brenda K. Wachel’s In the Deep is about the stories we tell ourselves before facing the truth. How much of love is real, and how much of it is just what we need it to be at the moment?
Marga (Maria Bata) is a woman in love. It was love at first sight, then a walk on the beach, and now Marga is engaged to Philip (Gui Agustini) with a promise — he’s taking her to Vegas. Time has passed, but it feels like a second; Philip is gone, and Vegas is no longer to be.
Now Marga has become a bit obsessed with Philip, and she tries to contact him. The memory of him is still strong, as if she can touch him, and she thinks she sees him wherever she goes. Then the clues…her bills were left unpaid, and her bank account is empty.
Marga drifts underwater in a dreamlike scene from In the Deep.
“It was love at first sight, then a walk on the beach, and now Marga is engaged to Philip, who’s promised to take her to Vegas.”
With In The Deep, the story is fully developed, getting right to the point and cutting out extraneous moments or side plots. It’s more than just finding the love that got away; it shows how love (the emotion) shapes how we see our lives as Marga slips between truth and fiction.
Brenda K. Wachel’s short film, In the Deep, feels like a short movie in every sense of the term. By the end, I felt like I had seen a full-length feature film, as Marga has a full character arc with a Usual Suspects-type revelation. Again, given how quickly the story unfolds, Wachel brilliantly hits all the emotional highlights.
Wachel packs a full feature’s worth of feeling into a story that never wastes a second. In the Deep proves that the best stories are about the emotions they evoke along the way.
In the Deep screened at the 2026 LA Shorts International Film Festival.
"…packs a full feature's worth of feeling into a story that never wastes a second."
