Someone sent me the link to this short film yesterday, and I almost didn't click it. I don't like it when people tell me I'll like something. It's a character flaw, I'm often wrong, and I enjoyed it. Beyond that it had something quite powerful to say on the theme of human coexistence. It isn't necessary to include anything more about the latter point. It's enough to note that there is such a level of interpretation available in the film. I'm not going to discuss the plot in tedious detail but I will give some broad strokes.
Fact
Released in 2019.
There is a Director, Marshall Curry.
20 minutes and 37 seconds. I checked for you.
It's won some short film prizes, including an Academy Award, isn't that something?
Here's the cast, minus some children and extras:
Maria Dizzia as Alli
Greg Keller as Jacob
Juliana Canfield as The Neighbour
Bret Lada as The Neighbour's Husband
Opinion
The opening city shots are visually impressive, giving us a hint that this is a film that cares about how it looks and setting up a clean and clear aesthetic. The audience is given time to enter the scene and the story. Interior apartment scenes are well staged and varied intelligently to give a sense of mood.
The cast is interesting, Maria Dizzia and Juliana Canfield give excellent, restrained performances in challenging roles. Bret Lada's character doesn't do much, so not much to say there. Greg Keller was, unfortunately, occasionally distractingly bad, but manages not to spoil things too much. For me, his tendency to overact is jarring given that he's always sharing a scene with Dizzia, who is consistently good. I have seen her in a couple of other things and I either like her irrationally, or she's just a good actor. You decide.
I like short films with sparse setting and closely focused plot, and this definitely applies here. The film is framed (forgive me) around a couple looking out of their apartment window and into the windows of the facing apartment, where they observe another couple's life over a period of months. I also think the film is unusually good at portraying relationship interaction, despite the shortcoming mentioned above.
Conclusion
I recommend this film highly. It isn't perfect, but it achieves what I assume are its artistic goals very well. We are drawn in, held, and sent away with something we didn't have before. When the film seeks to affect us, it does so fairly gracefully and with sufficient subtlety that I didn't feel like emotional beats were ever overdone or sentimental. As I watched it, I quickly went through the stages of "OK, I'll have a look" to "he's annoying but this is pretty good" to "hmmm...wow". The final stage I complete for you here, I hope this review leads you to enjoy the film as I did.
Here it is