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   Short Film Critique: 
   Dead Serious

   Director: Andrej Arsenijevic
   Expected Rating: PG-13 for mild drug use
   Distribution: None
   Budget: $3,150
   Genre: Drama

   Running Time: 46 minutes

   Release Dates: October 1, 2006
   Website: None
   Trailer: None
   Review Date: April 1, 2007
   Reviewed By: Kari Ann Morgan

Final Score:
8.3
How do we critique films? Click Here To See.

The line between reality and fantasy is creatively blurred in this demi-feature from Slovenian director Andrej Arsenijevic (ar-SEN-ya-vich). The film is the definition of an auteur piece: it is unique and creative, and all aspects of making the project –from start to finish—were completed almost solely by Arsenijevic himself (with a bit of help from costar Marija Grintal). The film is shot entirely in black and white (except for the last minute or two), and has almost no audio; there is instrumental music that plays in the background, and occasionally one can hear some of the action sounds above the music (see Audio section below for more details). But for the most part, it is basically a modern silent film.

Arsenijevic plays Adam and Grintal plays his wife Eve. In the very beginning of the film, the audience sees Eve trying to get rid of Adam’s dead body by making it look as though he passed out drunk at the wheel of his car and drove it over a cliff. However, when Eve goes back to the car to retrieve something, she sees Adam standing some distance behind her… even though the dead body is still in the car. As she goes over to talk to this living Adam, another Adam comes out, goes over to the dead body, and carefully ties his shoelace. As Eve watches in bewilderment, both Adams slowly fade away. This opening scene sets the mood for the rest of the film.

Odd? Yes. Confusing? Very. And while I do not consider myself to be an aficionado of auteur, artsy films, this opening sequence was intriguing enough to pull me in and make me want to find out exactly what was going on.

As Eve prepares to make Adam’s
death look like an accident
...
...another Adam stands by,
observing curiously.

--WARNING! Spoiler info ahead!--
The story shifts to earlier that morning; we see Adam leaving a woman’s house and hurrying to get back home before Eve wakes up and discovers him missing. However, Eve has already woken up and found that he is not home. Knowing why and deciding that she has had enough, Eve prepares two glasses of absinthe (apparently that’s the preferred way to start off the morning… who needs orange juice anyway?), slips some arsenic into one of them, and waits for Adam. When he finally arrives, she greets him calmly and drinks her absinthe (the one without the poison, obviously). Adam drinks from the poisoned glass, then collapses, unconscious.  (At first I thought he had died there, but the director pointed out that small amounts of arsenic cause a person to pass out, as the wife wished to stage a convincing accident later in which he would have needed to be alive.  It would have been helpful if some of this information could have been more clearly shown in the film, as most viewers would be unaware of these facts about this poison.)

Then it starts to get weird, because the action shifts back to Adam hurrying through the streets to get home. But then we start seeing multiple Adams along the way; some follow him, while others just observe. When Adam (one of them) gets home, he sees Eve putting the dead body into the trunk of her car. We watch the various Adams as they follow Eve to the cliff where we saw her at the beginning of the movie.

After the two Adams fade, Eve becomes conscious of the fact that Adam is not dead in her car after all. Then we see –in a sort of flashback—the reality: he had died on his way home that morning, and she is still at home with the two empty absinthe glasses in front of her. Eve realizes that she is the one who has poisoned herself in her deluded grief. As she becomes sick and vomits out the poison, we see Adam (or rather, his ghost) kneeling beside her with his hand gently on her back.

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