Review Reviews: The 2024 Oscar-Nominated Short Films at the Hop

Watching the Oscar shorts is not partaking of high cinema. Economics provide some speculative clues as to how short films come about: talent scouting, demonstrating new technology, or pursuing vanity. Whichever case it is, this does not change the fact that these are not feature films. Each has at most one idea, and then acts upon it. 

In reviewing these films, the questions to ask about them are: What exactly is that idea, and how successfully has it been executed? That is what I will ask for each film. I will be spoiling them. 

I would recommend that, if you intend to see them, you watch them before reading this article.

Live Action Shorts

It is worth noting a salient theme that four of these five films convey: their view of men. The first shows a man grieving and crying. That is it. The second depicts all men as sexually twisted. The third, again, shows men grieving, all with an inability to become friends. The fourth shows a troubled boy, although this film is more complicated. 

All this adds up to one glaring pronouncement: Men act as if they are evil, and the only safe ones are those who are feminized or dead. This fits for what I perceive as the implicit American elite ideology more broadly. 

Whether this is a good or bad thing is an open debate. Such values produce less masculine violence, but perhaps there are downsides as well.

The After

d. Misan Harriman, United Kingdom

This film shows a happy man with his beloved family. A very random and unexplained attack occurs, resulting in the death of his wife and daughter. He subsequently turns to Uber driving as he manages his grief. The last sequence has him driving a family that reminds him of the family he once had. 

The idea is contained in the title: What happens to people after tragedy? The unsubtle and idiotic answer this film gives is that they become sad. Surely there is more to say? The way this film deals with grief is banal. 

The writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes had it right when he said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Grief is one of those concepts that is not new. But it can be illustrated in more or less compelling ways. This movie did not compel, which is a shame. 

There are great movies about tragedy. Death Wish comes to mind. 

Unfortunately this movie has nothing to add.

Red, White, and Blue

d. Nazrin Choudhary, United States

This short has more than one idea. The short opens with a waitress in Arkansas looking at the results of a pregnancy test. She cannot afford the cost of an abortion, as a poor single mother of two children. A kind person at the diner where she works gives her the money. 

The waitress drops off her son and takes her 13-year-old daughter on a drive to Missouri to an abortion clinic. There is a long line at the clinic, and then comes the reveal: It is her daughter who needs the abortion. 

This allows her to skip the line. They then go home, thus concluding the film.

Until the reveal, I thought this film was the kind of idea one gets for films if one is a regular Rachel Maddow viewer. But the reveal at the end shows a far more cynical film. 

What are its ideas? 

The key, again, is in the title: The film conveys a pessimistic view of America as the land where young women are vulnerable and precluded from getting an abortion. 

Whether or not this is an empirical claim is beside the point. 

What matters instead is just how vicious that imagination is. This is not to deny that each respective aspect occurs: the violation of young women, the banning of abortion, and the cycle of poverty. 

But it is bold to imply that this is the essence of America. The movie works in that it executes its vision successfully. 

One must simply hope that there are other visions of this “country of vast designs” out there.

Knight of Fortune

d. Lasse Lyskjær Noer, Denmark

Here, we are shown another film on grief. The premise is simple: A man’s wife dies, and he sees her for the last time at the morgue. 

He meets a man who says that his own wife has died. We learn that, in fact, this man’s wife drowned years ago, and her body was never recovered. He has been hanging around the morgue ever since. The recent widower forgives the other man’s deception and provides him comfort.

The film attempts to lighten up the subject of grief by adding some humor, but I hardly found it funny. The film is Danish, so perhaps the Danes may find it funnier than I did. 

When I was in Copenhagen, though, most people had a good sense of humor, so I am not so sure that this film is actually funny. 

It is a more original story of grief than The After but again fails to move beyond banality. This is the kind of movie that, in two years’ time, I could rewatch and forget that I had ever seen it before.

Invincible

d. Vincent René-Lortie, Canada

The film opens and closes with the suicide of its 14-year-old protagonist. In between, we see him in juvenile detention and generally up to no good. 

While the premise is sparse, this was the best short by far. Generally, child actors are terrible and annoying (although Paris, Texas is a striking exception to the rule). 

This film is another such exception. The young boy’s performance shows real anguish. While the film uses the contrived “based on a true story” in the end credits, the pathos of the film makes such a standard move work. 

This is, to be sure, a film worth watching.

The Wonderful Life of Henry Sugar

d. Wes Anderson, United States/United Kingdom

No matter how repetitive Wes Anderson’s directorial style gets, it is clear that he is far more talented than any of the other directors with shorts featured at Dartmouth. 

The story to this short, too, is intriguing: It involves seeing without one’s eyes, gambling, the power of dedication, British colonialism, and all the rest. Somehow, I liked Invincible more though. 

Wes Anderson’s films always leave me emotionally cold. I particularly dislike The Royal Tenenbaums for this reason. 

This short has strong emotional content but inevitably strikes the viewer as clinical because of Anderson’s trademark directorial style.

Animated Shorts

The animated shorts seemed more about the technology of animation than the actual messages within them. Nevertheless, some of them were interesting.

Our Uniform

d. Yegane Moghaddam, Iran

The film opens with a “disclaimer” that some people wear hijab out of pride. 

Then the somewhat too-short film talks of women being forced to wear the veil in Iran. The animation was deeply intriguing but the story was non-existent. 

This film was forgettable.

Letter to a Pig

d. Tal Kantor & Amit Gicelter, Israel/France

This film is about a Holocaust survivor visiting a class and the way that memory passes through to the next generation. 

The eponymous letter was to a pig that blocked the survivor from the view of a Nazi and thus saved his life. 

A girl in the class is haunted by the story and ultimately hangs the pig on a chandelier. I have no idea what the director was trying to say. 

But it reminded me of the Holocaust survivors I knew growing up and made me think about what will happen when they have all passed away. The animation style is also incredibly beautiful. 

This is a film worth seeing.

Ninety-Five Senses

d. Jerusha & Jared Hess, United States

As this is a film about how wonderful it is to live and appreciate the world, it initially is striking when the narrator tells the story of how he got fired and burned his former workplace to the ground. 

He committed the crime not knowing that there was a family inside. The film is then understood as his appreciation of life as he is on death row. 

The reveal in this film works, and I found it to be quite surprising. 

Pachyderme

d. Stéphanie Clément, France

This film tells of a young girl in her grandparents’ summer house. It is always a little bit unclear what is going on, just like in childhood. 

It is implied, however, that she is continually trying to hide from her grandfather who has abused her. 

The film is, however, quite subtle, and it is a brilliant evocation of the way one reconstructs one’s own memory and can hide much within it.

War is Over! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko

d. Dave Mullins, United States

The purpose of this short is unclear: John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s dual career is irrelevant. Tied to this film is a story about a chess game communicated by a carrier pigeon in the trenches of World War I. 

One cannot imagine a more self-indulgent or absurd film choice. War is over? No. John and Yoko are over.

Documentary Shorts

This was a two-and-a-half- hour-long lecture.

Nai Nai & Wai Po

d. Sean Wang, United States

Imagine the most boring people you know. 

Then imagine them growing up and having to watch the story of their lives at ages of 80 and 94. 

This movie makes a convincing case that some old people do not do interesting things.

The Barber of Little Rock

d. John Hoffman & Christine Turner, United States

In between lengthy and repetitive speeches on the meaning of race in contemporary America, there is the actually moving story of what credit means for communities. 

This documentary shows that economics is not merely “the dismal science,” as Thomas Carlyle famously characterized it, but that credit can open a whole world up to new people. 

It is noteworthy that this film features interviews with various figures who have spent many years in jail. But it fails to reveal exactly what they did. 

Learning that would have helped me sympathize or fail to sympathize with each figure more.

Island in Between

d. Leo Chiang, Taiwan

This film is a self-indulgent look at “being caught” between Taiwan, China, and the United States.

There is less than nothing to say. Watching it did make me want to visit China, however. 

The ABCs of Book Banning

d. Sheila Nevin, United States

Somehow, a film of thirty minutes manages to repeat itself. But that is not the crux of my issue with this film. 

Rather, it is that, like arguments from the political science subfield of international relations, everything in this film is either obvious or wrong. 

For the obvious: Banning books on Rosa Parks is absurd. Agreed! For the wrong: No book should ever be banned. What about The Anarchist’s Cookbook that has instructions on how to build a bomb? What about child pornography? 

Another issue with the film, but with book banning as well, is that it lumps works of great literature, such as those by Toni Morrison or James Baldwin, in with very questionable books by Ibram X. Kendi. 

Let us praise nuance and thus not praise this film.

The Last Repair Shop

d. Ben Proudfoot & Kris Bowers, United States

This was the best but not by much. This film contains interviews with a number of instrument-repair people at the Los Angeles United School District. 

The interview subjects give their stories about how they ended up repairing instruments and what music means to them. Some stories, unsurprisingly, are more interesting than others. 

Nonetheless, it is a moving evocation of the power of personal storytelling, with just one person sitting in front of a camera, narrating his life. I would have preferred more of this in the other documentaries.