It was a morning like any other, until Flynn (Tim Barrow) begins noticing something strange as he works in his tool-shed. Sound suddenly begins to fade, at different decibels and gradually sounds begin to become imperceptible to the human ear. At first, Flynn believes that he is going deaf and that this is his own sense of hear betraying him. But when he sets out to search for his wife, Hannah (Vasso Georgiadou) Flynn realizes that this is an event on a mass scale when people around him begin to panic as sound begins to fade from the world.
TIMBRE deals with existential horror on a Kafkaesque level. The horror of waking up one morning and believing that your day will go on as any other day before it, and suddenly your body begins to betray you. Our world is a fragile one, our senses allow us to perceive it and when we lose one of these senses suddenly the world stops existing depending of the sense we miss. This usually happens on individual cases, and it doesn't mean it's not a life-changing experience for the individual, but it is certainly manageable, as some optimists would say: "it's not the end of the world" and one must learn to live with the affliction and simply go on. But what if suddenly the case is not individual and spreads throughout the world? Suddenly everyone begins going deaf, gradually sounds that we gave for granted begin to disappear. We don't know what causes this phenomenon, we can only theorize the way the characters in this short will surely do, as they try to explain their situation. Are their ears failing them, succumbing to some sort of biological agent spread in the air like a virus, or is sound itself that is abandoning the world, something more cosmic and supernatural going on? No matter, what matters is that the world will never be the same, phones have become irrelevant, thousands of years of refining language and communications gone, the pleasures of music and the works of Mozart or The Beatles lost forever, and listening to a loved one's voice or laughter has been deprived from us forever. The horror in TIMBRE doesn't come from monsters nor zombies or anything of that fantastic variety, instead, it comes from the loss of something that we were sure we would never lose, at least not on that scale. The ramifications of such event become evident, the entire world would have to change in order to cope with the new reality we live in. This is the horror of losing what we give for granted at a universal scale, the horror of sudden change and seeing the world succumb to panic as we realize that this is our new reality and that there's no going back to yesterday, when we never even gave a thought to the horrors that awaited for us tomorrow.
Director/Writer Gareth Peevers has crafted an existential horror-thriller that is an example of "less is more". Peevers smartly creates a short-film that is high concept without having to spend hours of development nor does it complicate itself with trying to dazzle its audience with unnecessary CGI that would have blown the budget out of proportion or worse kept the film from ever being produced. Instead, Peevers shows us an example of smart short-film deign by telling an effective story with minimalist elements. There's few characters on screen, almost no dialogue, few minutes of run-time of which none are wasted (there's very little narrative fat here) and the short's biggest "special effect" is simply its use of sound and the reactions of the characters towards their horrifying new reality. Peevers has chosen an invisible threat, the best monsters are often the ones we don't see and in this case, this is something that we don't even hear. The sound design works on levels as different sounds begin to fade one by one, from loud noises to voices and finally complete silence. The script by Peevers is an example of tight narrative, and his direction denotes a clear no-nonsense vision which translates into five minutes of expert storytelling, as the sound begins to fade, we are left with silent end-credits which end the film on a brilliant, haunting note. Tim Barrow and Vasso Georgiadou give life to the main couple who experience the sensory loss, both performers manage to capture the confusion and sense of despair as each sound decibel begins to leave them until there's nothing left. Special mention must also go to David Lee's desaturated cinematography that conveys the sense of isolation felt by the characters as well as Nico Metten's sound design which is the key for this story to work. We have seen many filmmakers trying to create over-complicated logistical nightmares and budgetary prohibitive films that in the end don't work out due to a lack of resources, but this short-film avoids all that by simply being smart about how to convey horror through sound or the lack of it to be more precise. Overall, a fantastic example of effective short-film film-making.
TIMBRE deals with existential horror on a Kafkaesque level. The horror of waking up one morning and believing that your day will go on as any other day before it, and suddenly your body begins to betray you. Our world is a fragile one, our senses allow us to perceive it and when we lose one of these senses suddenly the world stops existing depending of the sense we miss. This usually happens on individual cases, and it doesn't mean it's not a life-changing experience for the individual, but it is certainly manageable, as some optimists would say: "it's not the end of the world" and one must learn to live with the affliction and simply go on. But what if suddenly the case is not individual and spreads throughout the world? Suddenly everyone begins going deaf, gradually sounds that we gave for granted begin to disappear. We don't know what causes this phenomenon, we can only theorize the way the characters in this short will surely do, as they try to explain their situation. Are their ears failing them, succumbing to some sort of biological agent spread in the air like a virus, or is sound itself that is abandoning the world, something more cosmic and supernatural going on? No matter, what matters is that the world will never be the same, phones have become irrelevant, thousands of years of refining language and communications gone, the pleasures of music and the works of Mozart or The Beatles lost forever, and listening to a loved one's voice or laughter has been deprived from us forever. The horror in TIMBRE doesn't come from monsters nor zombies or anything of that fantastic variety, instead, it comes from the loss of something that we were sure we would never lose, at least not on that scale. The ramifications of such event become evident, the entire world would have to change in order to cope with the new reality we live in. This is the horror of losing what we give for granted at a universal scale, the horror of sudden change and seeing the world succumb to panic as we realize that this is our new reality and that there's no going back to yesterday, when we never even gave a thought to the horrors that awaited for us tomorrow.
Director/Writer Gareth Peevers has crafted an existential horror-thriller that is an example of "less is more". Peevers smartly creates a short-film that is high concept without having to spend hours of development nor does it complicate itself with trying to dazzle its audience with unnecessary CGI that would have blown the budget out of proportion or worse kept the film from ever being produced. Instead, Peevers shows us an example of smart short-film deign by telling an effective story with minimalist elements. There's few characters on screen, almost no dialogue, few minutes of run-time of which none are wasted (there's very little narrative fat here) and the short's biggest "special effect" is simply its use of sound and the reactions of the characters towards their horrifying new reality. Peevers has chosen an invisible threat, the best monsters are often the ones we don't see and in this case, this is something that we don't even hear. The sound design works on levels as different sounds begin to fade one by one, from loud noises to voices and finally complete silence. The script by Peevers is an example of tight narrative, and his direction denotes a clear no-nonsense vision which translates into five minutes of expert storytelling, as the sound begins to fade, we are left with silent end-credits which end the film on a brilliant, haunting note. Tim Barrow and Vasso Georgiadou give life to the main couple who experience the sensory loss, both performers manage to capture the confusion and sense of despair as each sound decibel begins to leave them until there's nothing left. Special mention must also go to David Lee's desaturated cinematography that conveys the sense of isolation felt by the characters as well as Nico Metten's sound design which is the key for this story to work. We have seen many filmmakers trying to create over-complicated logistical nightmares and budgetary prohibitive films that in the end don't work out due to a lack of resources, but this short-film avoids all that by simply being smart about how to convey horror through sound or the lack of it to be more precise. Overall, a fantastic example of effective short-film film-making.
