” I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy one, I will indulge the other.”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
‘ A Night in’ by Max Aaron is a tale of disappearance into a world of glee sans the repugnant humdrum of daily life. Christine uses her ‘ viewless wings of poesy’ (imagination) that shall temporarily eliminate all her qualms. The director states :
“My creative intention for this film was to simply give the world a fun escape from the misery of today, while dedicating a story to my cat.
An escape much like the wish of the Romantic poets is an attempt to break the shackles of tedium , the pangs of reality for a short span of time. This short film inverts the flow of horror behind shock. In fact there is almost a sense of familiarity with an otherwise ‘horrific’ creature. The director deliberately extracts the sense of monstrosity out of the creature. It turns into a compassionate, love seeking human being , a lonely soul in the modern world wanting a shoulder to cry on. One can’t help but be reminiscent of movies like ‘E.T’ and ‘Arrival’.
The message is pretty loud and clear. ‘We’ are one step away from ‘them’, the self is one step away from the other. It is perhaps a conversation, a feeling of genuine affection towards each other that is lacking in the modern world. A potent sense of otherness that creates these ‘ narrow domestic walls’.
The use of light or shall I say the absence of it enhances the amount of tension on the screen, the darkness around Christine adds to the eager anticipation of fear around the possible outcomes. The background music follows the lead of classic scores of suspense/horror. Only the outcome is a classic example of an anti-climax.
The ‘creature’ finds comfort in the embrace of Christine. It seeks her unconditional love, a primordial sense of belonging that dominates it’s psyche. Around darkness both Christine and the ‘creature’ find each other and they are never alone again.
In ‘ The Haunting of Hill House’ there is an excellent definition of love which reads :
“Love is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway. Without it, we cannot continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.” It is love that can truly destroy fear, it is when we are together that we find the torch that shall guide us through the tunnel of darkness.
