Acid Pink (2016)
Mike Phalin
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Starring Val Vega
Directed by Robert Anthony Jacobs
A young woman (Val Vega), donning silver hair, hot pink lipstick and eyelashes, sleeps soundly on shining white sheets. From the top of the bed descend two hands, sporting hot pink gloves. The gloved fingers wrap around the woman’s neck and her expressive eyes jolt wide and reality snaps back in.
The heroine awakes from the sanctuary of sleep, her eyes dart around the dark room trying to make sense of the nocturnal events. As she relaxes and tries to return to the land of Nod, the camera focuses on her neck. Dark purple bruises adorn her skin. Just as she begins to doze off, her eyes again spring to life as an unseen entity shrieks and moans. The screen cuts to black and the disembodied voice continues to cry, whine, and laugh in an unnerving manner. As the primal noises ring on, the credits roll and the screen fades to the black and the title card appears.
Acid Pink is a film with a run-time of around two minutes. Within those one-hundred & twenty seconds, there’s quite a bit to digest. Sleep is the respite relied on by many to escape stresses of the awake hours, but during those 5-8 hours of rest even a short sharp interruption can ruin the entire night. The imagination starts churn out possible scenarios for every noise. Each creek is a footstep of an intruder. Every settling timber is the moan of an unearthly spirit.
What Val Vega managed to, with the help of director Robert Anthony Jacobs and photography director Chris Cash, capture is that exact moment where the dreamworld smashes through reality, leaving shards of imagination shrapnel buried just outside of the sub-conscience. Vega’s dream is captured as softly lit, somewhat hazy and colorful. The real world is dark, sharp and pale. The audience is treated to unsettling closeups of Vega as she tosses and turns, doing that dance unfamiliar to anyone whose woken up from a particularly bad dream.
The voices and cries from an unknown entity are unsettling, mostly when the audiences takes this short film on single handed with headphones on in a dark room. There’s no warning that these eerie sounds are coming, and even more chilling is that they are not explained. The fate of the heroine is also unknown. Leaving the viewer’s imagination to speculate.
During Dread Central’s interview with Val Vega, she mentioned that this film is quite subjective as many people experience different terrors in the night. Each of those experiences are spawned from different times in the an audience’s background, but there is a universal fear attached to sleep when humans are at their most vulnerable. Within Acid Pink‘s short duration, a door once thought locked tight of bad nights was once again flung open, leaving this reviewer to stop a few times and wonder … just what was that sound?
Acid Pink is available to view for free via Vimeo or just check it out below. Be sure to check out the interview with Val Vega to learn about her next project.
[vimeo 192381095 w=853 h=480]
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
