A quality horror doesn’t consist in its “spectacular” monstrous creatures or in the intensity of its jump-scares. In fact, a quality horror manages to give the chills without using cliché ostentations which are more or less justified by the appearance of the supernatural. One such quality horror is the short film ‘Susie‘, depicting in a psychedelic-macabre key the failure of a young woman unable to express her own emotional truth. Jordan Doig falls into the category of intelligent directors for whom the horror film doesn’t find a purpose in its pure “pleasure” to frighten viewers. Therefore, even if the evolution of the characters is altered by the violent intrusion of a slightly fantastic element (although explainable to a certain extent from a psychiatric / psychoanalytic point of view), the cinematic construct doesn’t deviate from its “humanist” stake, illustrating in a kind of metaphorical key, between nightmare and daytime existence, the collapse of a sick relationship.
More specifically, the short film captures a kind of somatization suffered by the protagonist who continues to repress her true emotional essence, so that her negative energies finally spring up outside her, to impose their own rules. This results in a dizzying and well-thought-out interweaving of the domestic realism with violent dreamlike images, in a sort of combination of Dario Argento’s sense for the colour with David Lynch’s quasi-supernatural fragments.
Speaking about the Lynchian influence, this short film succeeds in balancing quite well the imagery that defies the coherence of a conventional narrative thread, with the firmness of an emotional core whose tension dissipates throughout the project in an equally attractive and terrifying atmosphere. The unpredictability of the characters’ actions is not used, however, as a means of playing with the viewer’s sensitivity, but as a form of subtle expression of the urges of a soul tormented by the impossibility of asserting itself. Indeed, this strategy, no matter how admirable, doesn’t support a better deepening of the relations between the characters, but this aspect is also caused by the relatively small dimensions of the project whose protagonist is far from having told her whole story. Therefore, Jordan Doig sets some very bold goals that he may not achieve completely, but his talent gives us the certainty that the short film ‘Susie’, although very magnetic even in this form, can become an excellent feature film.
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