Short Film: Night Moves

At 24 minutes, the Jeremy Cole directed Night Moves concentrates more on character than it does anything else and is successful because of that. It opens with a man, Ethan (Jared Walls), drinking, looking at a photo of himself with a woman and, eventually, making a call.

The call is to the Darkest Nights Escort Agency. He asks for a brunette and is informed that they only have one on that evening, a vampire. He answers that such an experience would be “delightful”. The film runs through a perhaps to prolonged series of establishing shots and then there is a knock on the door.

Isabelle Giroux as Abigail

Ethan tells the caller to come in but she says she needs an invite in. He appears more annoyed than anything with this but invites her in. Was this a game or a supernatural stricture? The film does not say but she is never bothered by the cross hanging from the door. He asks her name but she refuses to say, suggesting that she will be whoever or whatever he wants. Later in the film we discover she is called Abigail (Isabelle Giroux).

violence

What follows is a meeting of broken souls. He gets repeatedly violent to her, then falling into remorse, but whilst she retaliates occasionally she doesn’t actually seem to mind and suggests that she feels pain differently, that it fulfils her. At one point she bites his hand, viciously or instinctively, but then dresses the wound and hands him a knife, suggesting he can do to her what he can’t do to normal women.

Jared Walls as Ethan

After he cuts her, accidentally, and it heals he knows that he is not dealing with a mortal woman and yet he seems un-phased. He breaks through her emotional shell accidentally when he plays the Roy Orbison song In Dreams, something that makes him more violent (he is role playing that she is his ex-wife), but has a painful memory attached for her also. However the deeper they dig the darker the depths they’ll find.

fangs

By concentrating on character this shows that there is no need to move out of the small stage the film sets. The two leads work well, I thought Jared Walls looked familiar but this is his only IMDb credit. A satisfying little piece.

The imdb page is here.