Lenora, a young girl, wakes up excited to bake her father his favorite cake on his birthday. As Lenora bakes, she notices strange behavior from Mom. Meanwhile, Dad isn’t home yet and it’s growing late…
The new short film I Baked Him A Cake is an unsettling short that packs a punch that you don’t see coming. The 5 minute film begins starkly with Mother (Fleece) skulking around in the basement. She is removing the hand from a severed arm, bones cracking, sinew snapping, we see nothing but shadow, but can visualize all of it.
Upstairs little Lenora (Lillian Gray) stumbles around the house looking for her parents. What she finds in the bathroom is not only horrifying, but spells out what may have happened. Mother explains the bloodbath away and sends Lenora out of the room in order to continue cleaning.
What happens next is a quietly disturbing bit of cinema that sneaks up on you. While I Baked Him a Cake features gory imagery, it is used as supporting subtext for the true horrors of an aftermath that our young protagonist is about to experience. Gray’s Lenora is precocious and betrays a knowledge beyond what she expresses while Fleece’s Mother is stoic and sadly robotic, indicating what her relationship may have been like with Lenora’s father.
Seek this short out the next time a film festival rolls through your town.
