POV: Slasher Flick with A Bit of Everything

Brian K. Rosenthal’s POV, seventeen minutes long, is a pastiche of slasher flicks, its indulgence in tropes the evidence of love for the genre. In it are references to a host of staples like The Purge, Scream, and Halloween, not to mention one of its main characters—a towering figure constructed out of Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody, V, and HAL 9000. 

It opens with the news, quickly giving the audience a rundown of the world. It boils down to Halloween night equals murder, and therefore, lock your doors and stay inside. By ensconcing a news report (anchor played by David VonHippchen) with words like lockdown, epidemic and new normal within a home-invasion plot the film immediately invokes the pandemic, a possibly permanent feature for those who lived through it. More pertinent to the plot, it sets you up to expect what comes next: people who are vehemently against the lockdown (embodied in Joshua Borcyk’s pitch perfect reactionary news anchor), defiant teenagers, and general naysayers. 

Among the latter is Aubrey (Katie Mackey), sceptical about the claims but staying home with her husband (Frank, played by Chris Frank) anyway. Unfortunately for the couple, a large part of the plot’s action and horror are about to play out in their home. It is not exactly gore galore but has its viscerally grisly moments, like the prolonged extraction in closeup of a glass shard out of a character’s palm. The cinematography deploys a shadowy scene all around to maximise an atmosphere of paranoia. What light is used is often dim, indirect or dappled. 

At the halfway point, the mask-wearing assailant responsible for said glass shard in palm finds his match in another mask-wearer, this time affixed with a camera lens instead of eye holes (the footage, i.e., his seemingly all-pervasive view lends the film its title). The violent clash that ensues—a mix of hand-to-hand combat and knives—is set to a snappy score that intensifies the sense of pace. In the meantime, Aubrey and Frank have become superfluous as the narrative shifts towards a bigger scope while holding onto its secrets. The identities of the assailant, the vigilante, and the actors playing them are all left under wraps, almost certainly signalling a sequel and/or expansion into a feature. 

POV is fun, violent, and despite its dated form, reflective of the times that go beyond surface-level inclusions of flashy technology. Whoever the vigilante may protect or go up against, it is his all-seeing lens that is more interesting, as is the mix of fear, isolation, and technology amidst it all, no longer futuristic. 

Watch POV Short Film Trailer