Telling a story in two minutes is no easy task, especially with copious amounts of blood and gore and no dialogue whatsoever. “White Willow” is a short horror film by director Ryan Swantek that gained much popularity on social media due to its creepy imagery and underlying emotional disturbance.

We see a clearly troubled and insecure girl in her bathroom, her arms adorned with scars, the bathroom walls covered with pictures of models and beautiful women smiling. She opens a drawer and pulls out a razor blade; in a shocking move, she aims for her face instead for her arms. The result, in addition to pools of blood, is a Heath Ledger’s Joker-style sliced-open smile from ear to ear. Now she can be just like the girls in magazines…?

Obviously a suspension of disbelief is required, otherwise the poor girl wouldn’t admire her new “smile” in the mirror and instead would have died from a sheer loss of blood. But the graphic imagery and the jagged edits–much like her jagged smile–make for a very disturbing two minutes.

What amateur-but-improving filmmakers need more than anything is confidence in their original premise of the story, which is why the intercut religious references throughout seemed a bit out of place and unnecessary. When an audience is watching a girl practically cut her face in half, her rosary and Mary and Jesus portrait are the absolute last thing they think about.

Ultimately, “White Willow” is an exaggerated, but effective, metaphor for the very real underlying issue of extreme body dysmorphia, which in and of itself is a strong concept on its own, and tells a story in two minutes without saying a single word.