Shadows and Whispers has an interesting concept at play. A lost ghost ponders his life from beyond the grave. He seems stuck between worlds. The film isn’t the first to toy with this idea. The 2017 film A Ghost Story had a slightly similar premise and executed it extremely well. This short, however, is far more experimental, showcasing surreal landscapes that sometimes may lose the viewer.
The film doesn’t really have a tangible narrative. Frequently, we see an unnamed man on his back, dead. Was he murdered? Is that his house? Did he have a heart attack? Those answers aren’t given. Heck, it’s unclear who he is or what his life meant. Instead of providing those answers, the short dabbles with high experimentation and abstract concepts.
The entirety of the film plays out as a strange collage of varying images, and it’s tough to piece them together. There are frequent shots of telephone wires and a gray sky. We see birds and the man walking on a sidewalk. Like the rest of the film, these images don’t really provide any answers and merely confound the viewer. That said, they do look cool and there’s some neat camera work at play here, including images that look like pages ripped out of a graphic novel.
Still, I was looking for something, anything, to provide some clues as to what’s going on in this film. By the time the credits rolled, I knew so little about the deceased man’s life. I just wanted something to latch onto besides the barrage of artsy images that didn’t provide much context. I did start to wonder if this is the writer/director’s interpterion of death and what may transpire after. Perhaps, once dead, we see a series of images from our lives, mere snapshots from our time on Earth that all blur together and don’t quite form a cohesive narrative. Again, though, that’s just a wild guess.
I commend the high experimentation at the heart of Shadows and Whispers. There’s an array of interesting images in this and haunting landscapes, but beyond that, there’s no narrative here and little to latch onto. This is one befuddling short film.
