From Omeleto.
Two sisters summon a spirit.
I CALL UPON THEE is used with permission from Michael Anthony Kratochvil. Learn more at https://michaelkratochvil.net.
Nia and Jo are two young sisters in Australia. They live with their mother in a threadbare apartment. Their mother has collapsed into a mental breakdown, barely able to care for them or their newborn sibling.
The pair in their childish naivete decide to perform an incantation, partly as a diversion and partly in hopes of somehow bettering their lives. But when the game takes a turn, they discover something more disturbing and irreversible.
Directed and written by Michael Anthony Kratochvil, this unsettling horror short begins with the two sisters on a purposeful walk home, chanting a sing-song spell together. It’s the type of activity that children often do when they’re engaged in imaginative play, but when we glimpse the sisters’ bleak home life, with a catatonic mother and a squalling infant, we realize that the spell is more than a game.
The storytelling is brisk and economical, and the powerful, often uncanny visuals convey much of the narrative’s emotional weight in their precision. The film’s first part feels like a naturalistic portrait of a family in crisis, shot with saturated yet dingy colors that imbue the home with a sense of secrecy and squalor. The domestic space is framed in a way that conveys the almost abstract isolation of the girls from the real world, capturing how a troubled home life often exists in a separate sphere of experience for kids, partitioned from the public side of their lives.
Young performers Anna Cooke and Asher Bryans offer committed performances as the young sisters, anxious and increasingly desperate about their plight and matter-of-factly trying to solve it with the few strategies they have at hand. When their game works in a way they didn’t expect, the film takes a turn into the realm of cosmic horror, with eerie, unnatural colors and lighting coming to the fore. The apartment becomes a portal to a liminal space, one that eludes rational thinking and explanation. Instead, as a sensory experience, it evokes a realm of mystery, terror and sacrifice — one that must be made to be free of the squalor of their lives.
Ending with a distinctive evocation of the spirit world, I CALL UPON THEE is memorable as a horror short not for its gore or pulse-pounding tension, but for the genuinely otherworldliness it evokes, even without special effects. Refusing easy conclusions or explanations, it is eldritch in the truest sense of the term, its final lingering images eerie, haunting and disturbing. Its summoning conjures something elemental: underneath these surfaces of suburbia and civilization, with all its everyday privations and problems, lies something more ancient or even ancestral, tied to the land that we’ve forgotten we’ve built upon or the cosmos we’ve lost sight of. It’s waiting to be called forth, seeping into our known world through the cracks and fissures of damaged souls, of which there is no shortage, even with all the trappings of modernity.
