dir. Kristine Gerolaga

“Mosquito Lady”, a 2023 short film by Kristine Gerolaga, is about the horror of having a body that may split open, go to pieces, betray your intentions, and undermine your consent. In other words, “Mosquito Lady” is about being a woman; a bloody business, by all accounts. 

Gemma (played by Hannah Lorica) is a teen from a repressive Catholic family. She is pregnant and desperate not to be—but unlike the pregnant teens of my generation, who grew up in what now seem like halcyon days for Women’s Rights—Gemma’s terror is acutely post-Roe, though by no means a novelty for all that. Rather, Gemma has been returned to a version of maternity that is very old, indeed; the stakes of this pregnancy may well be her life. 

Out of options and just about out of time, Gemma seeks help from a dangerous source, from something that, like her, has no place in the modern world: the mosquito lady, or “Manananggal.” The “Manananggal” is a creature out of Pre-Christian, Filipino myth (who, conveniently, lives just up the block on Gemma’s 21st-century American street). (1) She is a shapeshifter, a changeling. By day, a beautiful woman, by night, both something more and something less: a fanged torso, severed from its bottom half. She feeds on blood, viscera, entrails, and embryos. She loses her legs but grows wings instead. She takes flight.

Gemma offers herself willingly. She follows the Mosquito Lady (played by Maria Lingbanan) back to her den. “I want to make a deal,” Gemma cries, “I need an abortion.” The terms are simple. The “mosquito lady” extends her proboscis and penetrates Gemma’s womb, but once she starts sucking—or so the monster warns—she may not be able to stop. 

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“Manananggal” means “to sever” or “remove,” and both women, in “Mosquito Lady”, are cut off: from history, language, homeland, and, perhaps most notably, a communal experience of womanhood.

The Manananggal, in Filipino folklore, precedes the Christianization that Spanish conquest brought to the Philippines, and yet, in the film, the mosquito lady prays to the same God Gemma is praying to in the opening scene – the God whose coming expelled and attempted to erase the Manananggal from her country. May God forgive me, the Mosquito Lady writes on the walls of her modest suburban den. In the Philippines, she may have been a shaman, a priestess; she may have had a place in the order of things. But here, in modern-day America, the Mosquito Lady is a monster in flight from her own monstrosity.

But she is not the only woman in this film at war with her own body. In a sequence of flashbacks, we see fragments of Gemma’s upbringing, her so-called “sex-ed.” Gemma’s parents (played by Ina Dahilig and Rhandy Torres) threaten, fearmonger, and warn Gemma of the dangers of sex, specifically the dangers of her sex. Both parents are shot from Gemma’s POV and appear to her (and so us) as nearly indistinguishable, faceless creatures, their heads out of frame, cut off at the neck. 

Womanhood, in this household, is a condition that can only be treated by amputation. Mother and father seek to sever Gemma from her developing body. They act out of love. They don’t want their little girl to grow up.

The only gesture of solidarity passed between mother and daughter (the only hint that the mother is also a woman, and so, sympathizes with Gemma in the way only a fellow sufferer can) comes in the form of another warning. The mother lifts up her shirt to reveal a scar that runs the length of her abdomen. “She tried to take you too.” The mosquito lady has struck this house before. Gemma is terrified – and she’s right to be. 

To be in possession of a woman’s body and simultaneously alienated from womanhood is frightening; it is to be in possession of a body that has no precedent, no etymology, no history, no protections, and no place in the order of things.

When Roe was overturned, the decision read that the “State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification and is thus not subject to the heightened scrutiny that applies to such classifications.” (2) The precedent cited, Geduldig v. Aiello, goes even further: in this 1974 case, the Supreme Court ruled that California insurance companies who discriminate on the basis of pregnancy are not in violation of the Equal Protection Clause, saying “there is no evidence that [the insurance program] discriminates against any definable group or class.” (3) One feels the loss of Roe wasn’t just a blow to women’s rights, but a denial that women, as a group or a class, even exist. 

I don’t mean that women are the only people who can become pregnant, nor—God no—that pregnancy is a compulsory feature of womanhood. Rather, the far right’s backlash against feminism—in favor of what the right deems, euphemistically, “traditional family values,” seeks to redefine womanhood as inextricable from motherhood. JD Vance’s pronatalist stance, for instance, operates under the logic that a woman’s sovereignty and citizenship are contingent on her willingness and ability to mother. This also means that a woman’s inability or unwillingness to mother is a failure of her womanhood which threatens both her claim to identity and in a post-Roe world, her very life. 

In 2023, when pregnant teenager Neveah Crain started showing signs of sepsis as a result of her miscarriage, her Texas doctors did not intervene to save her for fear that removing the fetus could be legally construed as performing an abortion. (4) Neveah, meanwhile, was rupturing. She was going to pieces. Doctors watched black blood stream from her nose and mouth while Neveah’s mother screamed for someone to “Do something.” No one did. 

The doctors’ failure to act reveals an interpretation of the Texas ban that has horrifying implications for anyone who might become pregnant. Effectively, any operation that results in the removal of a fetus amounts to an abortion, and an abortion, just like a murder, is legally defined by intent. In the event of a miscarriage, an act of the body becomes indistinguishable, legally, from an act of the will. Any complication that arises over the course of a pregnancy might signify the mother’s unwillingness to mother. I.e, if she had wanted to become a mother, Neveah wouldn’t have let her baby die. 

Her failure, then, to carry the fetus to term, was a failure of will, and it cost Neveah her life. 

Motherhood has always been a potentially life-threatening condition, and yet today, when modern medicine has significantly reduced the risks associated with pregnancy, the fear and paranoia surrounding pregnancy are at a generational high. That’s because every woman who finds herself pregnant harbors both a potential life and a potential crime. Who can be trusted? Not the doctor, not the father, and least of all one’s own body, which, in pregnancy, demonstrates, even emblematizes the body’s ability to act without one’s knowledge or consent.

By overturning Roe, the Supreme Court attempted to make motherhood synonymous with womanhood, but effectively, it has made pregnancy an experience no woman can undertake without fear, a condition (chosen or unchosen) that carries with it the suspicion of crime, and the locus (in potentia) of a criminal conspiracy in which a mother and her entire support system (including family, doctors, nurses) may, at any time, be accused as co-conspirators. For fear of this, pregnancy becomes an increasingly isolated state, an unspeakable happening, something a body must endure alone. 

In light of this, when I watched the Mosquito Lady penetrate Gemma with her proboscis, I couldn’t help but think: here, finally, are two women relying on each other for mutual aid. 

Both women seek, from the other, freedom from the body, but freedom, in this case, comes at an unendurably high price. The Mosquito Lady can’t stop. If left to her own devices, she will take Gemma’s life. So, she begs Gemma to kill her, and Gemma, acting out of a profound will to live, complies, and lets in the sunlight which, so the myths say, must destroy the Manananggal. Gemma watches as she dies.

The camera zooms in on the Mosquito Lady’s face and one sees an expression of relief. It makes sense. She is an isolated monster, the last of her kind. 

Though Gemma very nearly also died, what the Mosquito Lady took was not enough to abort the fetus inside her. Gemma’s pregnancy is too far along. The fetus, it seems, has a will of its own. Gemma stumbles, trembling, out of the Mosquito Lady’s den. She is in labor. She collapses into her waiting parents’ open arms. 

By failing to abort her pregnancy and bringing the child to term, Gemma has been restored to a legible definition of womanhood. Her parents are likewise made whole. For the first time in the film, we see Gemma’s mother’s face, agape, and rent with love and grief. 

The ending is ambiguous. A shot of Gemma seen rocking her newborn through a barred window. She survived her pregnancy but remains at a remove—inside the same house from which she so longed to escape. We see shots of her parents cleaning up the Mosquito Lady’s den as if they were covering up a crime. 

We live in a time in which pregnancy is criminalized, and is, in some cases, punishable by death or by a letting-die which amounts to the same. Women, cut off from modern structures of support, go through pregnancy as if it really were an isolated experience, as if they were both the first and last of their kind. And some women, despite those conditions, still make it out alive.

But not all. When Neveah Crain’s mother watched the blood stream from her daughter’s mouth, she told her, “You’re strong, Nevaeh. God made us strong.” But Neveah’s strength, her will, was not, on its own, enough. These are the words of a helpless mother crying out, making assurances, invoking, when all else fails, an ancient belief. When you remove this scene from its context, it might belong to almost any place, at any time. Neveah’s life is in God’s hands. But when you widen the frame ever so slightly, one finds a team of medical professionals, with all the expertise, training, and tools required to save her, watching, as an eighteen-year-old girl dies.

¹ Hope Sabanpan-yu, “Performing the Body in Filipino Narratives: The Manananggal (Viscera Sucker) in Colonial Literature,” UNITAS 90, no. 1 (May 2017): 57–73, https://doi.org/10.31944/2017901.hosayu03.

² Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. (2022)

³ Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U.S. 484 (1974)

⁴ Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana, “A Pregnant Teenager Died after Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms,” ProPublica, November 1, 2024, https://www.propublica.org/article/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-abortion-ban-emtala.

dir. Wan Xin Tang

“Wildflower” (written and directed by Wan Xin Tang) is a film about River (actress Kelsey Carthew), a woman in the final stages of preparing herself as a sacrifice for a blood-sucking flower, and it feels like a corpse in all the best ways. It’s electric at first, then discomfitingly quiet, but ultimately fertile, fishing the fecundity out of decay. It opens with a bombardment of sensation, overwhelming in its excess as drawling ads for a butcher shop offering meat at an impossible deal blare over the whine of saws through bone, the hammering of blades through meat, and the camera cuts so quickly that all the dead flesh begins to blur into a single nauseating smear of greasy off-red. Once River purchases her meat and leaves, however, the movie pivots hard. “Wildflower” goes silent, as though the frenetic pulsing we’re introduced to was merely the death throes of a dying beast.

In her apartment, newspaper-covered windows mean claustrophobia sets in swiftly. Sanctity and devotion intertwine with bleeding and consumption. Liquid seeps through the ceiling like pus from a wound. And through it all, not a word is uttered—is that out of respect for her mysterious floral charge, or out of fear? Slowly, a sense of ritual emerges: River dices the meat small, stacks it carefully, consumes it raw. She drinks red wine joylessly, with ice. She cleanses her body with water and then adorns herself in a white gown. The film’s lack of speech opens space for a different sort of soundscape to emerge, a landscape of loneliness constructed out of leaky faucets, heavy rainfall, itchy fabrics, and exhausted mastication. That discomfort careens into outright horror with a shocking cut as dream descends into nightmare and the extent of the ritual is revealed. What we’ve witnessed so far is merely the preparation, and of course, the worshipping is so much more. 

Five nude figures lead River out of the black box play that is her life to a lonely spot in a forest where she digs her own grave, slits her wrists up the river (her blood is nectar-thick), and devotes all of herself to her botanical god. The final scene is a long, lingering shot of that ruined apartment, finally overgrown with similar flowers but utterly devoid of human life. 

There are elements of all sorts of tangled influences, from Walt Whitman’s obsession with plant and human embodiment, to the delicate, suicidal madness of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, to even Little Shop of Horrors. However, “Wildflower” carves its own frontier, wildly impressive in how much it accomplishes with slightly over ten minutes and approximately three sets. Explanations are neither forthcoming nor needed; the importance of the ritual is never explained, her relationship with the flower is utterly enigmatic, and perhaps the ending is even supposed to be a happy one. Despite the absolute uncertainty that permeates every second of this film, atmosphere and emotion ultimately leave room for just one question, heavy as intruding on a worship hall: is it okay to even be witnessing this?

dir. Lucía Forner Segarra

The rape-revenge genre is a bit of a mixed bag. It can be a little hard to appreciate the revenge part when you’re forced to sit through the assault in many films of this category. Those weary of the genre from fear of being retraumatized will love the no assault, all revenge “Berta” by Lucía Forner Segarra.

We meet our titular character, played by Nerea Barros, as she tightens a car down on a truck bed for repossession. The man who owns the car tries to argue, but Berta has already put the order in and there’s nothing that can be done about it now. She offers to take him with her to contest the ticket, and he obliges. As they sit in the car she stares at him intensely, giving him an out to finally recognize her. He fails, and his penance is a needle in the neck before getting choked out with his seatbelt.

When the man awakens, he is tied to a bed in a green-tinted room covered in torture tools, reminiscent of Saw. Finally, we learn the man’s name and why he was kidnapped. Alex, played by Elías González, raped Berta when she was a minor and she has been living with the horror of what happened to her for years. She tells him that everything will be ok if he apologizes. Alex vehemently denies that he did any such thing, but he says that if she wants an apology, he’ll say sorry. But an apology without thought and feeling behind it doesn’t satisfy Berta, and she slices into his chest as punishment. Alex finally breaks. He does remember her. He remembers exactly what he did. He admits that he did not stop when Berta begged him to. She even reminds him that the only reason he stopped was because he worried his mom would hear. Alex finally apologizes, but the apology is hollow. When Alex’s son is brought up, he begs Berta not to hurt him. She says she wouldn’t hurt him because he’s done nothing wrong, but Alex has. After giving him another shot at the apology, she sets up a surgery curtain and begins to remove the root of the problem.

The look of the film takes a shift here. When Berta is first seen taking Alex’s car, it’s bright and sunny. You can feel the warmth of the scene. Then we are dumped in a sickly, dirty, and cold-looking environment where the camera and dialogue are both tight and tense. By steep contrast, the sudden spray of blood as Berta hacks away at Alex is almost comical. It truly is a geyser of blood, soaking Alex’s head and chest completely as he wails. It almost feels slapsticky with how long the intense spray goes on. But it is for good reason, as we discover that Berta didn’t even follow through with the implied mutilation of Alex. When she removes the surgery barrier we see that Berta has positioned a pump full of fake blood to hose her assaulter down. She says that there isn’t a reason to cut his penis off because even if men didn’t have penises they would just use objects to hurt women. What she really wants is for him to raise his son correctly and to act right from now on. He makes her this promise before he is knocked out again.

The short ends with Berta talking to her therapist on a Zoom call. She’s moved away from the city that haunts her, and she looks happier in a sunny room. Her therapist asks if she feels better after writing down what she would say to Alex if she saw him again, and Berta concedes that she does because she thinks he understands what he did now. We end on Alex waking up abandoned with his car in the middle of nowhere, and we finally get our title card: Berta’s name carved into his chest.

Lucía Forner Segarra’s “Berta” is a phenomenal look at what truly goes on inside the mind of a sexual assault survivor. So many people live with this all-consuming rage that they must learn to work through, or it will become who they are. Berta is able to get the justice she wants without even doing the graphic harm she has dreamed of all of this time. By the end, we see someone who is able to move on and become a new version of herself. Rather than a reminder of brutality, this film is a representation of comfort to the hurt; especially with Alex being the only man seen in the entire film. Women are safe here, and Berta will make sure of it.

dir. Romane Eilahtan

Is horror absolutely more chic in French? In “Dead Tooth,”, we follow beautiful and skittish Tara (Tara Lindström) on the day she has a dentist appointment. The young woman leaves the workplace where she is bullied by her colleague (Inès Boukhelifa), and in the hectic streets of the city, she is knocked down and yelled at by rude, well-dressed Parisians. As soon as she gets into the dentist’s office, the receptionist (Norhloda Terrak) greets her in a dismissive and aggressive manner. Before you know it, two other clients cut in front of her in line. One of them, a man (Benoît Borkine), flirts with her manically and then abruptly stops when he sees her dead tooth. One disaster leads to another, and by the time Tara sees the dentist she is covered in her own blood and is in great distress. As you can guess, the dentist appointment itself will kick this short into real horror gear.

This film is incredibly slick and has high production value. The acting is hilarious in its vulgarity. The cast consists almost entirely of women, and they are all stunning, with a biting character. Director of Photography Florent Stramboli displays an impressive mastery, and composer Cello Solo Yann gets the credit for making this piece stressful, yet elegant. This is not an overwhelming type of horror film. Some scenes, the last one in particular, are very long and contemplative. This is not a fast-paced knee-jerker. What is scary about it is the way the film makes space to observe the physical and verbal brutality of the stagnant characters.

Yet, what places Romane Eilahtan, the writer/director, as an unusual horror filmmaker is their ability to create such an arc for Tara’s character. This short is really about a young woman who just won’t take any more bullying; after the dentist injures her badly, Tara transforms. She sheds her submissive self and turns into a raging, cheerful killer. And in a magical way, as day turns to night, all the tyrants from earlier in the film witness Tara all covered in blood, frightening yet lighthearted, with a smile pushed even wider by the cheek retractor left in her mouth. Eilahtan has the skill to shed light not just on bullying in a general sense, but also on arrogance and toxicity between women. Therefore, we are situated in a specific culturally – and gender-coded violence. The female characters around Tara are disrespectful to her time, take her food and objects from her, ignore her injuries, insult her in a highly misogynistic manner, and eventually harm her physically. I would argue that in the current political climate, this type of violence does not get enough recognition, and Eilahtan takes issue with that. 

It is no coincidence that the film ends with Tara pulling out her dead tooth, replacing the care she was meant to get from others with a sort of twisted self-care. She has liberated herself from being a pushover, and to dispose of that identity, she gets rid of the dead material that brought her to the edge in the first place. So who’s that gorgeous killer with a missing front tooth?

dir. Sarah Carlot Jaber

Contemporary media has largely departed from the murderous, monstrous depictions of the vampire. Even Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu (2024) seems to depict a Count Orlok who is motivated by a strange, deeper connection as opposed to the vengeful (and antisemitic) bloodthirst present in the original. While there are outliers, we often crave humanized vampires.

Lestat de Lioncourt grapples with the ethical implications of his thirst (Interview with the Vampire, 1994). Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (2008) examines an unlikely friendship between the paranormal and “normal.” More recently, Ariane Louis-Seize’s Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person follows an unusually sympathetic and reluctant vampire. Even the Cullens are vegetarian (Twilight, 2008).

Still, as Belgian director Sarah Carlot Jaber has proven with “Olga’s Eyes,” there is much more to explore when it comes to the contemporary vampire tale.

An octogenarian, Olga (Viviane de Muynck), sits on the stairs in her large estate. With tears in her eyes, she watches her daughter hurry boxes around the home she once knew. Her daughter, Simone (Erika Sainte), says that a real estate agent was supposed to stop by. In a wide shot, we see that Olga is clutching to this estate agent’s corpse, bloodless and pale.

“We’ve eaten the entire neighborhood,” Simone says. “You can’t stay here.”

Olga seems pained both by the transgression and her impending disposal to a retirement home.

“You’ll deal with those who have one foot in the grave,” Simone tells her.

This is where Jaber distinguishes herself: the subject. Many elements of “Olga’s Eyes” mirror some of those present in the comedy-horror Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person. Both vampire protagonists are reluctant to kill, instead opting instead to drink from blood transfer bags, and when they do strike, the victim often deserves it to some degree. Likewise, both protagonists form connections through music and find unlikely companionship with another human or humans.

But Jaber’s protagonist is assumedly in her eighties, and for that reason alone, we might assert that she is nothing like the other vampires depicted in contemporary media. We may assume, too, that this is not a coming-of-age film. 

What life is to be lived, what blood is to be sucked (or not sucked, for that matter) inside the sterile, geriatric halls of a retirement home? Jaber answers with a resounding: “Just you wait and see.”

Vampirism is only the premise of “Olga’s Eyes” as opposed to an all-encompassing plot. Instead, the short is guided by more resonant human facets of life that makes it altogether more compelling.

With just a 22-minute runtime, “Olga’s Eyes” examines motherhood, community formation, romance, sexual violence, and so much more. More than anything, it assigns vibrant personhood to the elderly, which they aren’t often afforded both in the media and in the fabric of our reality. Here we can see broader criticisms of the nuclear family and capitalism in Jaber’s work.

Jaber’s style is impeccable, too. The short features a distorted black-and-white filter for most of the runtime that is complimented by absurd, campy shots and equally campy dialogue. Nothing falls flat.

I often find myself thinking about the chalk scrawled on the pavement at the end of Jane Schoenbrun’s horror feature I Saw the TV Glow: “There is still time.” Schoenbrun’s primary message regarding gender identity and expression has lingered with me since I saw the film, but I have been struck by the pertinence of that chalk sentiment more generally in relation to the Other.

Good horror showcases the monstrous. Great horror explores the Other—the ways in which societal constructions reinforce the status of the so-called monster. 

Sarah Carlot Jaber doesn’t waste too much time examining Olga the Vampire. However, she dives headfirst into unpacking Olga the Octogenarian, and her message is clear: 

There is still time to dance, to love, to build a community with your peers, and, if you’re lucky, there might be a little time to suck some blood, too.

dir. Victoria Warmerdam

Is it worse to have misfortune befall you, or to find out that it’s been there the whole time? If you’re one to indulge in the anxieties of hypotheticals, keen to feed plausibility to your worst imagined fear, Victoria Warmerdam’s Oscar-nominated short, “I’m Not a Robot,” is a film for you. Lara (Ellen Parren), a music producer in the middle of her workday, is one banal software update and CAPTCHA away from earth-shattering truth. The camera slowly moving in on her in the opening shot doubles as her predicament creeping up on her. Isn’t that how it always happens, slowly yet suddenly, suavely penetrating our lives without us noticing until it’s standing right in front of us? Here, this comes in the form of the common fear that we are not human, but machine. Not human, but different, and therefore unambiguously monstrous. That we are Radiohead’s “Creep” and, worse yet, that we are the last one to find out.

Set in the current context of humanity’s increasingly promiscuous reliance on technology, ethical questions of god-like ownership over life and death take a new appearance in this 22-minute science fiction film, namely one wherein robots are way, way closer to us than we think (“The Others,” anyone?). “I’m a person, yes,” Lara reassures her oblivious coworkers but, more truthfully, herself, manifesting an identity she took for granted her whole life. There are no warning signs, the film seems to say. Lara not only never questioned her humanity, the one thing we hold with most certainty to be true about ourselves, but it’s not a coincidence that she is also a creative person, with a job in the arts, which is perhaps a nod at the facet of artificial intelligence that most frightens us: that it could replace us even in arenas we thought made us special.

Pam (the mysterious woman seemingly in charge of Lara’s situation, played by Thekla Reuten) and Daniël (Lara’s boyfriend, played by Henry van Loon) try to offer comfort, assuring her that she still has free will and that her life can go on exactly the same—that “Bot” is but a benign diagnosis. But crucially it is her bodily autonomy that is questioned here, as they deprive her of her ability to make informed decisions about her body and life. Instead, she finds herself having to look for answers in an online quiz titled “Am I a robot?”, very much echoing the online quizzes one can take to know if one is, for example, gay, bipolar, or both, and exactly to which percentage of likelihood. To the hesitant customer service agent on the phone trying to politely ask her whether she’s sure she’s not a robot, while the camera zooms in painfully slow and traps her in a close-up shot, Lara retorts, “If I don’t know, who does?” and the seed is planted in the viewers’ brains.

Lara’s robot perspective takes us away from the constant discourse of what AI could do to us and instead questions what it is we look for in it: from 24/7 AI romantic partners who will always be there to listen to us to bots who can do 90% of our thinking and work. Are we after a friend or a slave? And where exactly is the line? All of this points to the possibility that it is our increasing greed for these artificial comforts that will one day make it turn against us, and claim, in Lara’s words, ”I don’t know what world you live in, but in my world, this isn’t right,” surpassing humanity’s own moral compass. It doesn’t matter that she is welcomed into this new understanding of her life with open arms, from the results page of the online quiz displaying a firm handshake and the words “Welcome to the bot community!” to her boyfriend’s inept attempts to convince her of his feelings’ authenticity. The point of no return has been reached.

Below the surface, an aptly concealed comparison is also at play here. In an ostensibly alternative world where women have to worry about hiring men for inclusivity purposes, and where said men occupy secondary roles (customer service telephone voice, repair man, dull-witted boyfriend) written as little more than building blocks for plot, the purchasing and ownership of robots for companionship stands in for the purchasing and ownership of women’s bodies, fatally rendered objects of utility. 

Victoria Warmerdam shows us that tomorrow’s horror genre is set in broad daylight—in lovely buildings and nice weather, too. That dystopia can be found closer to our reality than ever before, such as in our dismissive, secretly controlling boyfriends, and that a lack of free will is more common than we think for those not on the right side of society; women, the mentally ill, or robots. It’s not the latter we should fear, it’s ourselves. In a world of unprecedented uncertainty, desperately calling upon philosophy to redefine our understanding of our own humanity, the horror trope of our entire worldview collapsing at any moment is no longer just a trope. But “I’m Not a Robot” is not a cautionary tale, either, perhaps because the distance between this world and ours is not great enough. Whether a robot or something else, we’d be right to acknowledge the tightrope our sense of who we are balances upon. Especially when who we are is a condition that only exists in relation to who we serve. 

dir. Yfke Van Berckelaer

Yfke van Berckelaer’s “Izzy” is short, sweet, and searing. With a runtime just shy of five minutes, this new short film from the Netherlands seeks to condense a lifetime of systemic and cultural frustration within a clean, compact container. “Izzy” stars Nahéma Ricci in the titular role, a character defined by her invisibility, by her silence, and by her capacity to exist almost exclusively in her interiority despite her body manifesting in the material reality.  Izzy’s characteristic semi-smile, an ingratiating pleasantry obfuscating a crescendoing madness, complements the subtext of the plot. The story follows a very natural-feeling, if relatively unoriginal arc: Izzy’s relentless neglect and unending exposure to vapid or misogynistic conversations leads to her eventual incapacity to tolerate such conditions.

Horror, as a genre, has developed a reputation around its willingness to write roles for women with negligible dialogue. The “silent woman,” the woman-as-object, as an innocuous piece of scenery, is a storied and well-established motif. Berckelaer’s choice to showcase the inanimate, overlooked woman–the woman denied of voice, of autonomy, of opinion–as the central character, feels like a commendable inversion of the archetype found throughout slasher and sexploitation horror. Izzy’s lack of recognition as a sovereign body, her relegation to a passive existence instead of an active one, becomes a pressure cooker, inviting the question: how long can we tolerate being dehumanized? A question more important, more prescient, than ever. 

The cinematography and editing are clever, creating a sort of nauseating fever dream of discomfiting, aggravating situation after discomfiting, aggravating situation. From corporate offices, to bedrooms, to cocktail hour, to movie theaters, Izzy is barraged by a maddening onslaught of successive frustrations that repeat, inverse, and re-pattern themselves in such a way as to make the viewer feel overwhelmed. It culminates in a moment of physical panic, a tense and dizzying sequencing that provides the viewer with an immediate and satisfying catharsis upon its climax. Berckelaer’s artistic choice of red glitter was a clever use of camp, especially for a short film working within the confines of a strict budget. The glitter is symbolic and evocative, but also exaggerated and surprising; subsequently, it contributes to the weirdness and unreality of the story. In a film that is so explicitly realistic and tonally banal, this element of camp helpsed to disrupt the predictability and adds a necessary injection of surprise.

There is much that is clever, good, and fun about “Izzy:” it is relatable, it is prescient, it is well-acted by Ricci, it is well-edited, and it is not overly insistent. While these things make the four-minute and fifty-second film enjoyable, it falls short of doing something particularly new or interesting. Watching “Izzy” is like watching an abbreviated montage of many of the films that have preceded it exploring how women are ignored, insulted, or overlooked by a global priority on patriarchy and the propagation of male superiority. I wished for something that felt fresh, that felt like a distinct or new exploration, a more emergent and unconventional symbolic language that would make me feel something new, something memorable. “Izzy” is good enough, but it is not memorable, and it does not evoke dread or fear or horror, because the path it treads has been beaten down by many feet before it.