This “short film” is actually a pair of linked music videos for songs “Lovers’ Roulette” and “Getaway.”  The former is in color, the latter in black and white. There is a slight plot, but it feels geared as much towards the music as towards the visuals.  The Lonely Man (Co-writer and executive producer Stephen Lind, who also wrote and performed the music) enters into an underground club through a tunnel.  The club itself is both nightmarish and stuck in the eighties – plastic sheeting everywhere with fans blowing it around the bodies of the performers, strobe lights, many men dressed for SMBD but also a production of Rocky Horror, all dancing provocatively and seductively.  The Lonely Man wanders through the nightmarish underworld, interacting with the other denizens, but also simply looking at the camera to sing.  As I said, it’s a music video.

He meets a man who joins him in a bathtub and then pushes him under the water.  I would credit the performer, and a cast list with character names is provided, but since none of the characters are identified by name, I cannot tell if this elusive savior/lover is the Lost Man, the Scorpion, the Snake, or the Getaway Man.  Regardless, the Lonely man is held under the water and when he emerges, the video is now black and white, the atmosphere much more subdued as the new song begins to play, and he makes his way back out of the underground club and leaves through the tunnel through which he arrived.

The images of Lovers’ Roulette are phantasmagoric, and the music is danceable.  My gut tells me that this is a short film instead of self-identifying as a music video (or indeed, pair of music videos), as it is part of a larger performance project.  Certainly, one can see echoed in the film narratives of journeys to the underworld; Dante, for example, or, perhaps more appropriately, Orpheus, a lost young man who also descended into the depths looking for his love.  The visuals are interesting, if evocative of many music videos from before.  Overall, an interesting watch but one I am not likely to return to.  I suspect, however, there are others to whom this short film will speak and who will return to it, and more power to them.