Marisol Okafor

I ran this for a late show and had to fight the room's brightness the whole way through. It is a genuinely dark film, in the literal sense, and it punishes a bad screen. On a good one there is a shot of the water at night where you can just see the far bank, and it is terrifying. Bring your lights down before you start it.

Okafor does something I have not seen in a thriller in years, which is to let the violence be boring for the people committing it. The scene in the gas station office runs long past the point of tension and into a kind of admin. Two men waiting for a third. Somebody eats. That is when I got frightened. The last twenty minutes are conventional and I found I did not care.

Eleven minutes and I have had the bass figure in my head since Thursday. What gets me is that the picture is cut to the room, not to the track. You can hear the tape hiss change when the camera moves closer, which means somebody recorded this properly instead of laying music over it afterwards. The last minute drops the image and keeps the sound. I just sat there.

This is what I mean when I say experimental does not have to be cold. It is a loop, it is a mood, it is a hot afternoon repeating itself, and it is also very clearly about somebody's grandmother's house. Eleven minutes. Complete. I have watched it more times than any feature this year.