EMILY

A man possessed by grief attempts to deal with the death of his wife.

Always an extra challenge to make a 48HR film that deals with some serious subject matters and this team has pretty much pulled it off. There are some strong moments to begin with, setting the tone and communicating the scale of grief. For me, the choice to take the magical crystal approach didn't quite land and while that sequence starts with a cool match cut the rest seemed a bit disjointed. I guess you were trying to put the audience in the lead's shoes in terms of a bit of confusion but I think it could have been more jump cutty and used more angles and close-ups to further settle us. The audio gets a little choppy at times and it's either tripod or camera noise that distracts a bit towards the end.

Once again nice to see teams taking a serious approach. Nice work!

The beauty and grief of life and death is given a closeup by Peake, who tackle a pretty big subject of how we deal with suicide.

This is a really sensitive subject to try and handle outside the confines of 48 Hours, and I commend the team for playing it straight and doing their best to utilise juxtaposition between memory and sadness.

For mine, the audio mix fluctuated in quality quite markedly throughout the films and I wasn't sold on the crystals to 'bring her back'. Yet we all deal with grief in our own ways and if this was for example drawing on personal experiences for the team then that raw emotion certainly presented strongly.

Very good performance by the lead, and the visual edit gave this an almost fever dream feel. Just due to the edit it didn't quite give me the gut punch that I feel it could have, but I commend the team for giving it their all.