Life is worth living… at the cost of your life! As paradoxical as it sounds, this is the very message of the short film ‘Crosshair: A Tipping Point’. Amit Patel builds a thriller-like project that is, in fact, based on an extreme therapeutic exercise through which people with acute depression end up activating their inner resources to survive, despite everything. Thus, the aspect of a race against time that the director orchestrates around his protagonist is, rather, a metaphor of an intimate state of emergency expressing the psychological contradictions of a man unable to appreciate the small details that make up his own existence. Not coincidentally, the main character is a man who knew the heights of fame, as he is an Oscar awarded actor / director, but, despite his fame, he is defeated by the demands of a world terrorized by either the threat of pandemic or the contractual burdens imposed by the others. In other words, this short film compresses in a few minutes the well-known pearl of wisdom “money can’t buy happiness” starting from the status of a character overwhelmed by the weight of fame or by the generalized anxieties promoted in today’s media.
Obviously, in such a narrative formula, the risk of pushing the whole project towards a preachy tone is very high. Amit Patel takes this risk, giving his short film the intention of an informing clip, which can provoke various reactions from moviegoers. However, beyond this aspect, the cinematic substance of the project is well dosed, while it works on the principle of a simple but effective sequential coherence. Therefore, the director uses a catchy narrative structure that promises a consistent dose of adrenaline, relying more on the emotional impact of music and dynamic framing than on the complexity of the dialogue. Basically, this project has all the chances to capture the attention of the spectators, regardless of their tastes, but the big question is whether or not the ending proposed by the director will meet the expectations of the thriller fans. ‘Crosshair: A Tipping Point’ is an alert short film, built around a character in a desperate search for his own happiness, but this happiness may be far too superficially illustrated to meet the demands of a protagonist (or spectator) faced with such problematic psychological stakes.
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