There are a couple of good things in this horror short. The opening shot of someone's perspective in the snowy woods is nice, bright with daylight yet unsettling. Then there's the first jump-scare, which is pulled off really well thanks to blunt sound design and very sharp editing. The piece of score that recurs throughout is also foreboding.
Unfortunately, everything else sucks. The acting is pretty awkward and that dinner scene is just unnatural, with badly-written and badly-delivered dialogue: "There ARE monsters ... and they ARE coming to get me". The scene in the shop is also very stilted, and it doesn't help that the thing we're supposed to be unnerved by is a silly-looking "creepy" grin.
Aside from that lovely opening shot the camerawork is usually very ugly, constantly zooming and focusing in and out, particularly on people's faces but also on silly things like a half-empty glass of wine or that black hole article the husband is reading. A lame Photoshop effect is used to give the monster-people scary faces, which looks laughably obvious.
No explanation is given for the events, but ambiguity isn't automatically a good thing - the horror of not knowing has to be earned, and this short really doesn't earn it. I feel like the black hole article was only shown as a way of avoiding exposition, but that somehow feels just as lazy as spoon-feeding the answer to us in dialogue.
A pretty bad effort overall, and despite pulling one off pretty effectively earlier, the short ends with a hilarious jump-scare complete with demon face and monster sound effect. Perfect.
1/10.
