Small Showers: Shame and Guilt Fester in the Shadows of Grief

Alex Rosales’ Small Showers, a 17-minute drama on a couple’s fraught relationship in the wake of bereavement, is agonisingly naked. In its examination of  how grief is shared between two people when one has a stronger claim on grieving, it throws the other into sharp relief, who knows neither how to go on with their relative wholeness nor how to take on some of that burden of loss on themself. 

The couple, Rachel (Lauren James) and Joshua (David Reilly) are at a diner after the funeral. She looks at her plate, unseeing. He looks at her. The disproportionate division of grief does not need to be verbalised. Instead, the cinematography places Joshua in colder lighting—a glimpse of his malaise at being left out amidst Rachel’s withdrawal from the world. 

The specifics of the loss and the funeral is left to the viewer’s imagination. All that we are told is that they had to book a hotel room for it, and that Joshua’s suit is a rental. His recurring discontent over his stained cuff is a discomfort the film telegraphs to the audience: the camera fixating just enough on the spot and his ineffectual scraping that it registers as a nagging, low-level unease. 

Joshua’s obvious powerlessness is matched, if not exceeded, by the intensity of Rachel’s emptiness. At its most wretched, the grief comes out as rage, and in this, husband and wife have common ground, though it may go unnoticed by them. At one point in a gut wrenching scene involving the housekeeping staff (Joan Marie Flaherty), Rachel shifts from her vacantness to anger to a guilt so enormous, you forget other narrative concerns. This is the beauty of the film. By contrasting the enormous with the seemingly inconsequential, it brings out the consuming natures of both legitimate loss and informal loneliness. 

Reilly imbues his look out onto the world, occupied by other more contented, less lonely people, with a furtive, almost begrudging, yearning. Conscious of committing some great perversion and unable to stop himself, it brings the tensions in his marriage to a precipitous boil. If only Rachel had not shut him out, he seems to radiate out into the world. When Flaherty returns as a waitress in the diner, she is once again entwined in a breakdown, this time Joshua’s. But there are no outward signs for her to take in; only the audience knows, and Joshua, and the restrained, despondent score that seems to measure his downward fall and shame with every beat. 

As he haunts and is haunted by the urges of desire, the audience feels complicit, feels the strength of his ill feeling and his need, and thus feels the icy burn of his seeming transgression. These eventually intermingle with guilt and affection in an emotionally strained climax of this sometimes ghostly film about living. In the end, sharing in the helplessness is the best he, or any of us, can offer. 

Small Showers, produced by Jaap Deinum and Geneva Pierre-Jerome, is the latest film from Oopsduck, a creative agency and production studio.

Watch Small Showers Short Film Trailer