Revenge doesn’t always have a sweet taste; revenge that heals is an illusion. ‘Three Brothers Two‘ is a short film tackling the premises of such a destructive temper, building around a family tragedy an explosion of negative energies that distorts the emotional balance of the protagonists. As a follower of realism with psychological inflections, Craig Moore creates a painful short film about the suffering of losing a loved one and the difficulty of the healing process people often confuse with the law of the eye for an eye. Thus, this project is conceived as a series of consequences triggered by a previous event, following the evolution (or involution) of domestic micro-harmony members who are engulfed in revolt or try vainly to find a culprit. Without pushing the structure of the short film towards a thriller-like, pathological area, the director proves a good narrative dosage that ensures the authenticity of his characters, creating protagonists with strong inner dynamics.
The death of his brother due to an overdose pushes Jack to develop an uncontrollable hatred towards Tony, the one who bought the lethal drug. But this conflict triggers new challenges, since Tony is the brother of Aine, Jack’s girlfriend who is fighting to defend this fragile emotional balance, which is about to fall apart.
The great quality of this project doesn’t consist in a complex narrative – the events do not exceed the premises of a more or less “popular” tragedy in other films of this kind – but in the intensity, in the emotional burden of the characters acquiring an almost palpable human consistency. Of course, the merit for this aspect is not only due to the well-articulated script or to the “invasive”, intimate directorial perspective, but also to the actors whose work is more than commendable. The emotional substance of this trio faced with the suffering of an irreparable loss is distilled by Craig Moore in strong images, with a well-mastered compositional dynamic, which capture with a painful naturalness the protagonists’ confrontation with the limits of their own emotional endurance. However, these limits of one’s endurance do not reduce the short film to a visceral experience but delimit the premises of a real healing process. In fact, ‘Three Brothers Two’ is a painful hypostasis of the human soul that can see in suffering not a blockage, nor a way to embrace revenge, but an opportunity to reach a new means of knowing yourself and understanding your fragility.
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