An old friend of mine recently joined Shooting People and sent me a link to his short film. As those of you reading this blog in its original form will know, my virtual doors are always open to new films and I do my best to watch everything that comes my way (I am quite behind though…)

My friend’s film is only two minutes long, and for that I thank him. He also had the good sense to upload to the Shooting People Watch Film site meaning all I had to do was click a link and I could watch it. It also features a brilliant use of shadow from a large fan which adds a great layer of visual interest and character. I make no bones about the fact that I intend to someday steal or “homage” this trick – that, after all, is the joy of filmmaking. The whole beauty is not to work in isolation but to take ruthlessly from all other films that have ever been made – reusing what works and abandoning what doesn’t. And in most cases what doesn’t work in a short film is a twist.

This is quite a bold statement since most short films are little else. However it makes more sense if you think about feature films and all other forms of story telling. Twists are, of course, an integral part of the story teller’s armoury, but whilst there are many great twists in the history of story telling there are very few great stories that don’t exist beyond their twists. In feature films I can only think of one and it’s not Fight Club.

Fight Club is the story of a man falling apart. The great big jaw dropping twist is a sublime coup de cinema but it is just a very elegant way of letting you experience the world in the same way that the main character does. Fight Club is not about the twist, it’s about the consequences of it.

This is the problem with twists in short films; by dint of being short it is far harder to make the audience care enough about what they are seeing that they are sufficiently affected by the surprise when it comes and harder still to say anything of meaning about the consequences of that surprise. The film becomes about nothing but the surprise and that is very unsatisfactory.

My friend’s film is a good example. Here it is:

And don’t worry, I checked with Paul first that he was OK with me ripping into this in public. He is far from being either the only or the worst offender; I wanted to write this blog because I see this device backfire time after time and I just want it to end.

And like I say – that fan is brilliant.

Anyway, my problem with this film is that the twist structure hides the active dramatic question of ‘why’. The point of the piece is that you are drawn into believing she is reliving her own childhood trauma, only to find that she is in fact reenacting it. But that means for most of the film you think she is just reliving her own childhood trauma which is quite a passive situation. Without knowing more about her as a character what can we feel except sympathy? With no dramatic question the poor actress has to do all the work, the ratio of sympathy to apathy that you feel is entirely down to how affecting you find her performance is – stuck in the dark, on her own in a virtually empty, characterless hotel bedroom – she has her work cut out and I think she does a sterling job but it’s all up hill.

By revealing that abuse is actually happening in this scene and not just in her memory, all the director does is show that he can surprise the audience – an easy task since as director he holds all the cards. To create this easy surprise he’s had to rob us of any reason to keep watching in the first place.

Imagine this film the other way round, without a twist. Because whilst watching an unknown woman apparently relive her childhood trauma is not dramatically interesting – watching a woman abuse her child is (horrible but) inherently dramatic as it forces you to ask “Why is she doing this?” To then reveal that what we don’t know is the truth about her own abuse is much more powerful because rather than being a twist for twisting’s sake, it is answering a question that has already been asked.

Rather than leaving the actress to emote in an empty room she would be an active character, actively doing something, albeit something awful. And the resolution, rather than being merely a twist that leaves you feeling “Oh I see, so she’s actually evil”, would be a revelation that answered the dramatic question of ‘why’ whilst leaving open the moral issue of ‘how’.

Startling people is easy, making them think about something is far harder. The twist may leave your audience reeling but it evaporates quickly on the tongue. The only feature film I can think of that is built entirely around a twist (in the way that so many short films are) is “The Usual Suspects”. Here the whole point of the story is that it’s being made up by Kevin Spacey. As the credits roll you realise that pretty much everything you’ve seen has been a lie. It’s a cheap trick, a smug trick, and, as Kevin shakes off the limp and straightens his posture you are supposed to feel utterly cheated but be warned – this is the only emotion that a twist without a story can provoke.