Sundance Film Festival 2024 Review – Hyper-colored silliness against deadpan absurdity pretty much sums up writer-director Dimitri Simakis’s amusing short The Rainbow Bridge. At the beginning of the film Tina (Thu Tran) sits in the lobby of Rainbow Bridge Enterprises, a clinic offering direct communications between pets and owners. Tina is anxious to communicate with her 19-year-old pooch, MeeMoo before kidney failure takes him into the great unknown.

The Rainbow Bridge leans heavily into the cringe with a fabulous infomercial playing in the lobby of this questionable enterprise. Complete with VHS artifacts and late 80’s flourishes, happy customer (David Brown) relates how he was able to hear his pet cat tell him that he was “enough.” Tina feels good about her choice to make contact with MeeMoo and is soon invited into the examination room. Well, not so much an examination room as it is a mad scientist lab.

The overtly duplicitous Dr. Bailey (Heather Lawless) introduces her assistant Herb (James Urbaniak) and Tina explains her situation. Right away there is something that the two whitecoats see in Tina that immediately makes them a little too anxious to get her strapped into the communication machine with her dying dog.

The Rainbow Bridge was laugh-out-loud funny. Sure the bumbling scientists were corny but the sheer insanity plastered a big fat smile across my face. Lawless was priceless as the weirdo doctor. Wielding a motivational speaker vibe that could snap like a brittle twig into screaming demands, she earned her screen time. Another highlight was Tran’s utterly flat delivery that was perfectly calculated to deliver full clueless straight-man goodness. I would be remiss not to mention the colorful production design and art direction that delivered as much as the big finish complete with a MeeMoo voiced by Fat Tony.

Really, The Rainbow Bridge was a refreshing jolt of foolishness that made me wonder what my pets would say about me.

7 Out of 10