Selfie, from writer/director Nick Hagen, opens on a girl (Ayla Davis) texting her boyfriend when she notices a door in her house has swung open. We can sense her unease but she keeps taking selfies, spurred on by his demands to see more and more skin. What begins as mere paranoia becomes increasingly tangible as the fleeting image of a figure starts to appear in her camera.

The foreshadowing is pretty overt and you get a sense of where this short is going pretty early but while the tropes of the inexplicably open door and the killer being visible just long enough to make you question what you’re seeing are quite familiar at this point, they’re handled here with a certain flair. The subtle pans and zooms give the cinematography life without becoming distracting and while the audio could’ve perhaps used more of that light touch, with some of the stings and crescendos seeming a bit forced, it nonetheless serves its purpose of adding drama to what is otherwise not the most evocative of settings.

Selfie is a prototypical slasher that adapts modern communication as a means to capitalize on the genre’s familiar beats and there’s nothing particularly wrong with that. It lets you know what it’s going to do from the opening seconds and lives up to the expectations it sets with a refreshing amount of style.