The beauty of life often lies in its fleeting nature, even when a friend leaves this world behind, creating a void that seems impossible to fill. ‘The Box‘ plunges into existential tragedy, allowing a formative friendship to resonate with a painful kind of beauty. In essence, director Carlo De Benedictis tackles one of those experiences that continue to live on long after they are over. Starting from the theme of a friendship shattered by the extreme gesture of suicide, the short film is a deeply moving artistic endeavour that speaks about what survives in the aftermath of a tragedy, about the gestures and moments that memory preserves according to a logic of its own.
The relationship between the two characters begins simply, when He, as a bullied teenager, is noticed by Her while struggling with his mute suffering. From such a gesture gradually comes the feeling that, for the first time, someone is truly on his side. The recipe of a beautiful friendship is completed. And yet life’s irony strikes with implacable force: the girl who knew how to recognize another person’s suffering seems, in turn, to have been unable to make her own pain visible.
Carlo De Benedictis works very effectively with memory as a cinematic form, using flashbacks without warning, within an editing structure that sometimes becomes deliberately disordered, in order to explain the inner struggle of the young man. On the other hand, the cinematography is clean and attentive, while the music accompanies the nostalgia and sense of loss with great sensitivity, as though it were trying to carry on its own some of the emotion that the story does not fully articulate. Still, the relationship between the two protagonists acquires a particular delicacy, built through small gestures and the sense of a complicity that survives time. Seen retrospectively, their friendship triggers after the disappearance of the young woman, a form of emotional memory that the protagonist continues to carry with him. In this sense, the short film preserves around the act of suicide an area of silence that leaves room for grief and for those things we can no longer understand once someone is gone.
‘The Box’ remains a sincere and sensitive short film, made with an evident cinematic instinct. Perhaps, in its current form, the project does not yet tell us everything about its two protagonists, but Carlo De Benedictis vividly captures the way someone can continue to live within us long after they are gone.
