Do you like dolls? What about creepy dolls containing the captured souls of recently-deceased children? Well if you answered yes to either of those, you should make an appointment to see The Dollmaker. Sure, he might look like the deranged offspring of Christopher Lloyd and Woody Harrelson with a dueling scar and the outfit of a Victorian magician but if you send him a lock of your dead loved one’s hair and an article of clothing, he’s got the magic touch to bring them back to life. Okay, that might be a stretch. It’s more like he uses their leftover energy to create the illusion of life with the minor caveat that if you don’t return them to the box after an hour you start to go crazy and forget the person ever died in the first place.
This is the predicament that Jenna ( Perri Lauren ) and Rick ( Sean Meehan ) Deyton find themselves in after employing the services of the enigmatic Dollmaker ( Daniel Martin Berkey ) and somehow things end up going a bit south with this arrangement. We’ve seen this sort of thing play out before but Gremlins this is not, with the short feeling almost like something you’d see from Stephen King. It’s not Pet Sematary either, if that’s what you’re thinking, but there are traces of his style in the characterization here. Jenna and Rick both have different responses to entering into this and it’s interesting to see how those feelings develop as they begin to become more acclimated to the doll. The Dollmaker is a particularly vibrant character with mysterious motivations and a detached cynicism about his work that walks the line between eccentric and sinister.
The Dollmaker uses the classic trope of placing characters in a dilemma that will obviously lead to their downfall and watching how everything crumbles to great effect. It doesn’t hurt that it looks great as well with some strong lighting and creative camera work. Like the special doll you keep in the reinforced glass case because the last 5 people who touched it ended up dying mysteriously, this is a short worth treasuring.
