Won’t Be Long Now: The Psychological Horror of Parenthood

Billy Nawrocki’s Won’t Be Long Now uses a thoroughly indie praxis with VFX teams to create a 22-minute horror about a new father’s love induced paranoia. With the responsibility of a brand new, barely functional human on his hands, the unnamed narrator-protagonist begins to disintegrate completely as terror sets in. Danger and safety can look the same, especially to the uninitiated. 

Aside from writing, directing, lighting, shooting, editing, producing, and doing hair & makeup, Nawrocki plays Father. For the most part, he is the only one on screen. Alyson Nawrocki as Mother and Penelope Nawrocki as Child flit in and out of the narrative while Father commits himself to his nightmare of elusive threats. What begins as a meditation on the frailty of life and nature of death, and what could have been a fulfilling raison d’etre, leads Father down literal dark roads and illegal weapons. It finally comes to separation from the very family he wants to protect—and it is still not the worst of it. Of course, it would not be a horror if it were.

Mother’s calm headed personality would be funny (and the laid back performance is a great counterbalance to everything else) if the narrative were not so consumed in the blink-and-you-miss horrors: it is basically obligatory to be swept up in the deluge with a protagonist so insistently logorrheic. Billy Nawrocki is thorough playing the character, not holding back on any of the character’s turns from neurotic towards outright psychotic. It is hard not to appreciate the labour that went into almost single-handedly executing what would have been by nature an intensive project. 

Its most interesting parts are when it mixes in other film and video, or even better, flirts with a sense of history by using old home videos. The James Wan-esque presences Father finds in them are compelling; though you know that he is paranoiac, it is actually easy to believe him when the shadows lurk so menacingly in decades old footage. These bits and pieces branch out the narrative to include a broader world in it—bright daylight instead of dusk or midnight, for instance—giving a break from the pure headspace of a man for whom his immediate world is both receding and too overwhelmingly active. 

Won’t Be Long Now is quite the trip, and all the better if you buy into it. Depending on your position—that is, whether you feel more like Mother or Father—it can be oppressive or terrifying. Though sharing Father’s bleak fears is by far the more taxing endeavour than watching from the outside. Either way, no one is likely to walk away from this unaffected. 

Watch Won’t Be Long Now Horror Short Film Trailer