12 Satisfying Short Films For Your Burnt-Out Quarantine Brain

November 11, 2020, Greta Rainbow

A rewarding film for every genre, all under 40 minutes

Every night in quarantine is a question of what to watch. Recently, my fried and frazzled brain melts at the idea of a full-length feature, and I am close to losing my family and friends if I continue Emily in Paris. So I turned to the Academy Awards’ most neglected category: the narrative short film, defined by a run-time of 40 minutes or less.

The short is a particular art form, once synonymous with cinema itself. Today, film students test out dialogue and camera technique within manageable confines. An impressive short can be an entry point to receiving funding for a feature. As a viewer, a great short film leaves me contemplative of what was, and wasn’t, said or seen. “I think that short films often contain an originality, a creative freedom, an energy and an invention that is inspiring and entertaining,” actor and director Kenneth Branagh said. “I think they are, as Shakespeare put it, a good deed in a naughty world.”

Here are 12 transportive films currently streaming online, some well-known and some obscure, to shake you out of the usual viewing routine.

The Campy Horror: Hair Wolf, 13 minutes, HBO Max

Writer-director Mariama Diallo was inspired to make her short horror-comedy while walking in Crown Heights, a rapidly gentrifying millennial neighborhood in Brooklyn, and spying an orphan tuft of synthetic hair on the sidewalk. She remarked “braid,” and her boyfriend misheard “brain”; her concept of a white-girl zombie in a Black hair salon was born. Hair Wolf uses the genre’s campy tropes to critique cultural appropriation and the way it plays out on social media in particular. Instead of jump cuts to an axe murderer, a group of glam hair stylists gasp at the Kylie Jenner lookalike peeking through the window. When an “infected” Black man says “all lives matter,” it’s a nervous kind of laughter. Hair Wolf could not be more appropriate for 2020’s pandemic Halloween.

The Mystery: Madame Tutli-Putli, 17 minutes, Prime Video

The best animation is the not-for-kids, highly morbid sort, and Madame Tutli-Putli, with its references to Carl Junge and leering men aboard the night train, is exactly that. Madame Tutli-Putli is on a journey with her gramophone and about 40 vintage suitcases, racing from the past and toward something else: modernity? Eternity? She is interrupted by a heist that no one else seems to notice, a tenet of surreal film. The filmmakers, Clyde Henry Productions, combine stop-motion and computer animation so the gangly, textural puppets blink with human eyes. Madame’s eyes are 100 percent melancholy, and through them we divine the meaning of her trip. Madame Tutli-Putli is a lesson in imagination and interpretation done better than most “open-ended” blockbusters ever have.

**The Noir: What Did Jack Do?, 17 minutes, Netflix**

It’s simply David Lynch interrogating