There is an art to the short film that doesn’t exist in any other medium. You still have to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but do it in less time than most episodes of television. Unlike television, the short film usually doesn’t have the benefit of previous episodes to build story or follow-up episodes to help wrap it up. No, the art here is making everything self-contained and under fifteen minutes. Many shorts fall short (har har) because they have a great idea and absolutely no idea how to execute it in the time allowed.
Aly, a short film written, directed, and edited by Kevin L Lee, faces all of these obstacles and yet still lands a self-contained story with three solid acts in right around the time it takes me to place an order with my favorite pizza chain. The film stars Max Schuster (as a slightly nerdy and lonely man who is overly nervous for his incoming date) and Angela Wong Carbone (the confident incoming aforementioned date with a secret). Schuster plays the nervous geek to eleven and nails the awkwardness of someone who is very interested but has no idea what he’s doing.
The other side of that coin is Carbone, who in turn acts the part of a girl who just wants to have fun and is forced to take control of the situation with relative ease. Both were believable in their respective roles and watching her secret unfold in their (very awkward for him, time of her life for her) love scene was a blast.
Of course, the secret being kept here is that the young woman is a vampire and when he asked her over for a drink, I’m not sure this is what he had in mind. She doesn’t kill him but instead just takes a little nibble while they are in the middle of Barry White time and for whatever reason, he is a little bit (har har, more puns) put off by the experience. It is also very clear that he is intrigued, which should have been his most surface-level emotion to me. When she asked if they could do it again, he hesitated but I say, don’t be a wimp, bro, she’s obviously into you.
Aly is a fairly easy premise for a short, two people getting together and one of them having a secret, but here the fact that the secret is that one of them is a vampire just makes the scenario more enjoyable. It is very worthy of the few awards it’s gathered on the festival circuit (Carbone won best actor at the EB Indie Film Festival and the film itself won best short) and I am excited to see what comes next for all involved. If you can see this, you should take it and at only thirteen minutes, you don’t have anything to lose. Besides, vampires need love too.
Aly is a perfect example of a short film done right, a simple idea, executed with grace. It didn’t try to be something that it wasn’t, it embraced the medium and ran with it.
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