All right – from the jump, Kickstart My Heart lives up to its name.  A great opening starts the action (and the horror), and then it doesn’t let up for the next ten minutes until the credits role.  If, as Guillermo del Toro argues, cinema is a roller coaster for the soul, this is a short, fast, dizzying roller coaster that I’m going to ride again.

Lilly (Emma Pasarow), out for a run, is hit by a truck.  She wakes up in bed, confused.  Richie (Cooper Alexander), her dead little brother, is there to explain the situation: she has to fight to come back to life.  Her injuries are literalized as monsters (some of which resemble orcs) that want to fight and kill her.  She must fight her way out of the hell of her own mind, visualized as her home, albeit a dangerous and phantasmagorical version of it. The film flashes to x-rays and injury scans as she fights, linking the monsters to actual injuries from the accident.  It also cuts back and forth between the EMTs attempting to stabilize Lilly’s body and her fighting the metaphorical monsters, with periods of her losing fights representing when she is coding or has stopped breathing. The film integrates them smoothly and effectively.  This is really energetic visual storytelling, and a fun literalization of a metaphor.

The film also offers great fight choreography; even better fight camerawork. Cinematographer Allie Schultz employs a dynamic camera (watch for the first fight that ends with a fork in the monster’s head – feature action film filmmakers take note – that’s how you do it!  And that’s just the warmup.  The violence and the filming of violence in this short are top notch, and writer/director Kelsey Bollig should offer a master class on how to achieve this quality of action on a low budget.  Kudos as well to Pasarow who delivers convincing violence, while also finding the pathos of the character.

In a coda, the film reveals it is based upon and inspired by a real accident, showing security camera footage of the 2019 crash and subsequent rehabilitation and recovery. Kickstart My Heart has also proven a festival darling, being programmed all over the world, and it is easy to see why: a good film, well made, exciting and dynamic, displaying the potential of the medium in the service of a good story.