Distinct directorial and visual flare isn’t quite enough to save this short from a predictable, nautical coded psychological breakdown.
While often a vessel for a director to showcase their style the short film form can also fall into the trappings of the filmmaking reigning supreme over a story of any substance. This is the case for director Paul Holbrook’s creepy seaside yarn When She Sings which attempts to wrestle with grief and isolation in all the ways audiences have come to expect from a folk-adjacent horror aesthetic.
Set in a dreary British seaside village Fay (Laura Bayston) is a talented artist plagued by visions of a sinister mermaid. She works in the local chippy and seems withdrawn from people around her, turning to her art for solstice. Holbrook has a great handle on his craft and offers intimate and disturbing close-ups with woozy camera work to unsettle and establish that something is off early on.
Fay is accosted by a plague of mostly old, strange looking and leery locals speaking in cryptic messages with the strangeness perhaps being linked to her sister’s untimely death. These locals are completely overcooked, especially Garrick Hagon as The Creep, a weathered old man who cackles with a smile that swaps subtlety for ham-fisted horror tropes.
These interactions seem to make Fay retreat into herself more and more and the production design of her cluttered house and the malevolent force do provide an icky swirl of dirt reminiscent of a seaweed heavy ocean. But the script written by Holbrook and star Bayston does little in service of coherence or a more refined exploration of artistic expression relating to trauma. We get the classic disturbed scribbling and subsequent portrait telling us Fay’s mind is veering towards the dark side but beyond this there are only endless interactions with the locals to hammer the idea home.
It is hard to watch the short without feeling like great influence has derived from Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Évolution which similarly utilises a seaside setting to fulfill an experimental vision. Only while Évoloution keeps its mysteries genuinely mysterious and unexpected there’s a procedural feeling to When She Sings that leans on great atmosphere eclipsing great storytelling. It’s hard to care about anyone or anything when invention is drowned out and surrounding characters are mostly there for an extension of the setting rather than their own motivations.
2.5 / 5
When She Sings is a decent calling card for Holbrook that should grab attention but there is not anything unique here that we haven’t seen in horror’s historical obsession with the idea that “something’s not right in this town”.
