The best wine is kept in small barrels, they say, and this 3-min short film is a perfectly formed drop of bone-chilling horror. Written, directed and edited by young director Hiroho Mieno, “Comforter” is competing in the genre section of the Winter Film Awards, the Winter FEAR Awards Horror Film Competition.
“Comforter” is screening at Winter Film Awards International Film Festival 2020
A young woman (Hatsune Yazaki) comes back home at night, presumably after work. She is probably a 9 to 5 worker, tired and bored after a day at the office and has just picked up something at the convenience store on the way home. Once inside her little studio-flat, she thinks she has spotted something, maybe a shadow, on her bed. She holds her breath; there is a person on the bed! No, it's just the comforter. Or … is it?
This little film is very good fun to watch, and it would be truly satisfactory too, if only it didn't leave you wanting more. Taking inspiration from the folk tales of yūrei (ghosts) or their vengeful version onryō, the director channels Sadako with irony and skill and Momoto Otzuki's original violin score is an essential contribution to the hair-raising outcome.
The narrative is obviously tiny, but there are lots of subtle subtexts buried along the way. The body language and the clothes the woman wears tell us of an ordinary life and commuting to and from work every day until late. The unadorned flat tells us of the reluctance of going back to the small rented apartment, a standard accommodation in the big, soul-destroying metropolis, and it tells us of tedious evenings alone, eating convenience food for dinner; it tells us of a flat that sucks the life out of you, leaving you in the quicksands of your own bed, drowning in your comforter. The horror of it!
“Comforter”, with its antithetic title, can be read as an allegory of the depressing conformity of modern city life for a lonely individual, and the comforting (!) feeling of slipping slowly into that grey zone, but can be also enjoyed purely for its chilling and atmospheric snippet of storytelling. A promising filmmaker, I hope to see a feature film from him one day.
