What’s the worst that can happen to your sperm sample once you give it up to the clinic? Find out in this excellently paced short featuring Kenneth Branagh (yes, that one) as Joseph Barnett, a man who, following a crudely drawn map, finds himself lost in the middle of nowhere. He suddenly receives a mysterious call on his cel phone, advising him to check the back of his car where he finds, wrapped in a blue tarp, the dead body of a fifteen year-old girl.
Here’s a film that just keeps getting better at a very even pace, calculated to pull the viewer helplessly along, whether they want to go on this trip or not, until the end knocks you down with a satisfying sucker punch. Phil Stoole knows what’s up when it comes to creating suspense. Watching this film a second time, I caught a bunch of little clues along the way that make the ending all the more satisfying. The film does get a half star taken off, however for the biting of Lodge Kerrigan’s imagery of crackling telephone lines from “Clean Shaven”, another film that has to do with a dead kid. If this was intentional, then I apologize, but the similarities are just too great.
