More like a collection of home videos than an actual film, since Khavn shot them with a Video-8 handycam and in shoot-edit fashion, “Five Shorts” is still indicative of his cinematic style, even without the visual extravaganza that later became his trademark.
The short begins in playfulness, with Khavn depicting five shorts, although not the ones we watch, but the ones we wear, under the sounds of various remixes of “Light My Fire”. After this intro, a man in glasses gives his answers, occasionally yelling, to some “invisible” questions, mainly saying to someone “I don't want to see you”.
The second part focuses on the fish inside an aquarium and their lives, particularly regarding food, with Khavn showing the aquarium in various angles.
In the third one, a man whose face is in the dark for the most part, is talking to someone that is probably his brother (the segment's title is “Twins”) referring to an incident of the past that highlights the cruelty of the sibling. Then the brother, who is revealed to be a twin, replies to his brother's accusation, revealing an even darker aspect of the story.
In the next one, a man who is never depicted on screen, tells a rather surrealistic story while the camera shows various parts of a room, including a Dragonball poster, a Playstation etc. When his mother (?) however, tries to give him the phone, he is nowhere to be found, and no one in the house knows where he is, despite the fact that he seems to be able to see them and tries to talk to them.
In the last short, a man with his face almost sticking on the camera lens, makes various extreme sounds that seem to mimic the ones his father “presented” on him when he was a baby. Now a grown up, he criticizes him for his attempts to make the baby laugh, which they continued for many years, until his death. In this case, Khavn seems to criticize the intense efforts fathers take to make their children laugh, in a rather non-PC comment/joke.
Actually shot with inside various rooms of his own house, the short features just monologues and narration but not any kind of dialogue. There is an energy in the roughness exhibited here, while some of the elements that later characterized Khavn's oeuvre are also present, like the handwritten on-screen text and the “blasphemous” sense of humor, but the whole endeavour is obviously amateurish and extremely no-budget, resulting in a film that mostly addresses hard-core fans of the Filipino director.
