Man Hand

You can see this team went right down to the wire getting this in on time with a couple of noticeable visual blemishes and unfinished credits. Funnily enough, given it's a film-within-a-film horror, it kinda works to its advantage, adding some surrealness to the nightmare movie world. Solid effort and a good reminder of how important it is to hand your film in on time, flaws be damned.

I love films within films, but even moreso I love films set in cinemas. From FADE TO BLACK and DEMONS to ANGUISH (one of my all time favourites) the meta aspect of watching characters watching the big screen will never get old for me, and to take that even further and add oneiric atmosphere and make a genuinely creepy horror film, yeah I'm rambling but I adored the film.

The opening frames with soft flickering light where we see clear discomfort for our leading lady treated with amusement by her date immediately set the tone for the film. We know that that's not standard social behaviour and so with no history of the characters it piques our curiousity.

And then the cut to a warning being ignored takes us figuratively and literally down a very dark rabbit hole, a journey where we question reality of what we are watching and what the characters are watching. Bigas Luna would be proud.

Congratulations on the best cinematography win! Watching this again to review made me truly appreciate how incredible your inky blacks compared to the popping characters and framing really make the film shine. I felt like the use of negative space combined with sense of dread from that incredibly evocative soundtrack had me as a viewer on the edge of my set throughout.

Performances great also. The one thing that I personally felt would have just pushed this film into contending for top 3 etc would have been a little bit more emotional gravitas to the outcome. Like its good, we immediately like our protagonist and fear for her safety, I just personally felt the ending a big sudden. But on the other hand the air of mystery is one of the films greatest strengths so I'm not really complaining!

Truly a skin crawling journey. Didn't understand a thing as far as the story but didn't care one bit. It crawled into my subconscious + didn't leave me till the very end credits. Lovely but yucky;-)
1Million percent reccomend gutted by couch kumara followed by 99,999,999 percent recommend this film!

Man Hand was a subtle, slow film that probably left a few members of the 48HR audience feeling like they may have missed something. This stunning visual film was let down by the lack of a punchy sound design, but had a menacing tone throughout, led by great performances and one of the creepiest mise-en-scene on display at the grand finals. Although the story was clear, I think shots held slightly too long and lost momentum and interest in the overall story. Does that mean that I didn't think this film was impactful? Not at all. This was a great demonstration of filmmaking that for me, needs to be 100% perfect to hit as intended, which is an extremely tough ask in the 48HRS competition. Glowtime tackled an impressive subject matter and stayed well-away from your standard, easy comedic tone and I applaud them for their creepy result! Well deserved cinematography win and sign me up for a ticket to your next horror short.