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 a capuchin money about the murder of his lover, a hen! (Capuchin monkeys are the organ grinders of the primate world.) The Twin Peaks creator got kooky as recently as 2017, with a black-and-white parody of old-timey cop shows where two men drag on cigarettes, drink damn fine black coffee and wax poetic about their days on the factory line. “The ladies have been talkin’ Jack,” Lynch says from one end of the train station cafe table. “Yeah, right. With the Easter bunny I suppose,” Jack retorts, in a nasally version of Lynch’s own voice. For members of the Lynchian cult, What Did Jack Do? is like a portal to the artist’s brain during REM sleep. For everyone else, talking monkeys are hilarious criminals.
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The Offbeat Drama: The Black Balloon, 20 minutes, Vimeo

Before Josh and Benny Safdie became famous, for crime thrillers Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019), they shot their dark, quotidian stories with available means: borrowing the family’s home video camera, shooting with non-actors on the street, taking notes on a stranger’s subway car monologue. “They express something wild, intimate, and uncompromised about bohemian life in New York,” film programmer Olivier Pere told Indiewire. “It reminds me of neorealism and the American underground films of the ‘60s.” In this reimagining of The Red Balloon, a stressed father ushering his children’s birthday party down six Manhattan blocks loses grip on a rainbow helium bouquet. One lonely, anthropomorphic black sphere floats through Midtown and Central Park, getting roped into petty crime and relationship mediation. By the end, the balloon is sooty from the city and its people, and seems genuinely more self-assured. As always, the Safdies make great use of a prog rock-influenced score.