The Collector opens with a quote from William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. ” At the edge of his dreams, there was often the sound like the faint, distant cry of someone in distress, and for minutes after waking he would feel the anxiety of some duty unfulfilled.” Immediately writer-director Stuart Wheeldon’s short lays out its thesis. It also sets up unavoidable comparisons. While The Collector explores themes of faith and perception like The Exorcist it should be commended for its originality in a new story.

Here we meet Father Raymond (Nigel Barber). He is a holy man with a dark secret surrounding a pub known as The Royal Oak. The pub gains a new owner in the friendly Sarah (Rachel Prince) who ignores the town stories. Sarah has heard the stories of how the previous owner died, in fact, in a bit of a spoiler, we see it play out at the beginning of the short. The business owner doesn’t believe in possession, nor does she believe anything Father Raymond tells her when he visits with a warning. Soon she too begins to hear the creepy voices over the phone, and items begin moving on their own, and Sarah will blame it on anything but the paranormal. Will Father Raymond be able to stop the inevitable before Sarah suffers a terrible fate?

The Collector is a little shabby. The structure of the story leaves little room for mystery or a sense of discovery. The score is overbearing and repetitive. Wheedon makes some very questionable stylistic choices, including time stamps that don’t seem to have any significance and a random shot that is made to look as if it were recorded on a surveillance cam for no apparent reason.

The misgivings that I noted aside, Filmmaking is not easy and The Collector is far from perfect. But it does try. There is a genuine desire to entertain and to unnerve and Wheeldon is nothing but earnest in that desire.  I think what I appreciated most about the short was the way Wheedon’s script approached the debate of faith versus perceived reality. Here Father Raymond was desperate to save someone from a fate they refused to see. That is where the film really works.

Stuart Wheeldon’s The Collector is a valuable exercise to consider.