A young filmmaker (Sauvik Pandit) starts to make a psychological thriller with one of his friends. After they start filming, they start feeling depressed and confused for unknown reasons. The filmmaker starts to behave very differently with his girlfriend and she observes that he is going into a dark state of mind. The filmmaker and his cinematographer friend go to a very mysterious place for filming and things start to turn into a very deep and dark psychological problem.
“Startup: The Real Story” review is part of the Submit Your Film Initiative
For a short found-footage project, “A Half-Finished Film” is quite intriguing. The backstory involving the relationship with the filmmaker and how he's intending to go on this quest to finish the piece, gets this off on a fine note. The emotional anguish of going through the creative process and trying to ensure that the idea sound feels authentic and genuine. The anguish felt over the emotional weight of the project coming to life and trying to keep it rolling would be incredibly stressful which is ably replicated here. Given that this shooting takes place during a period of isolation and loneliness instead of fostering a sense of collaboration, it all fuels this issue nicely. In turn, that starts to bring about several fine touches of deep-seated psychological traumas.
It's really in the second half, though, where this short falls short, despite some likeable aspects. With his psychological issues coming to the forefront, the changes that are noticed here with the attempt to explain everything through surrealism ideology are rather interesting. That brings about some livelier scenes of the filmmaker being tormented by flashing images of buildings and strange locations causing a search into the meanings of nightmares. Still, the short is pretty light of a lot of other factors. The lack of action and focus on off-screen narration to depict everything that happens in the first half takes a while to get going. As well, while the finale features some of the more abstract themes and issues present in his philosophical crisis, it tends to leave this highly underwhelming finish. It ties into the purpose of the film but that's still a prominent factor in the short.
Being filmed in isolation does make some of the more obvious filmmaking tactics quite moot, relying on washed-out visuals and quick-cut flashes for any dynamic trickery. These tricks are done to denote the visual of the filmmaker's burgeoning psychosis coming undone, while the rest of the short is simple slice-of-life scenes of him going about his day, taking notes in a notebook, or being on his computer. It's all simplistic and efficient to denote the intimate nature of the project which is all fine and well, creating a serviceable movie with some slight issues.
