From Omeleto.
A man contacts the dead.
RARE MEDIUM is used with permission from Emily Maya Mills. Learn more at https://linktr.ee/raremediummovie.
Dave is a seemingly normal man whose girlfriend has passed away. He hires Gus, a spiritual medium, to contact his deceased lover Maggie. Worried that Gus is a scam at first, Dave soon realizes that Gus can very much channel the dead.
Their session begins on a suspenseful but hopeful note. But Dave and Maggie are more than just star-crossed lovers, and Gus’s fate hangs in the balance.
Directed by Emily Maya Mills from a script written by Ryan Meharry, who also plays Gus, this darkly comedic horror short could be framed in different ways: as a rambunctious and clever spooky season take on Bonnie and Clyde romance, an especially bizarre love triangle or a supernatural riff on a crime story. Either way you spin it, it’s devilishly clever, sleekly crafted and a wild thrill ride, complete with some New Age satire and a mordant sense of humor.
Full of creepy zooms in and out and an uncanny, expressionistic eye for weird details right from the beginning, the visuals communicate a disoriented state of mind before settling us into Dave’s encounter with the medium, played by Meharry as a mystic seer with just a whiff of modern-day hippie. After assuring Dave that he has a genuine spiritual power, Gus proceeds to contact Dave’s deceased love, Maggie, and then channel her spirit via his body. This exchange is played with an ominous sense of anticipation, which is quickly and hilariously upended when Maggie enters Gus’s body.
What transpires is awkward, intimate and very weird — and as their interaction proceeds, we see just exactly what bonds Dave and Maggie together. It’s venal and squirm-inducing, but their arrangement and dynamic are fascinating. It would be easy to camp it all up with broad, farcical performances, but Meharry and actor Dave Theune keep their characters fairly grounded, even when hitting the darkly comic or ironic notes: Maggie/Gus is helpful and often conciliatory, while Dave slowly unveils a believable toxic dominance and menace lurking underneath a bereaved, meek surface, exerting control over his partner-in-crime, even when in spirit form. But when Maggie draws the line and tries to exert some boundaries and preferences, the pair finds themselves in a confrontation.
Creepy and darkly funny, RARE MEDIUM falls into the horror genre in part for its characters’ sinister predilections and proclivities. But perhaps the real horror is how control and manipulation are so insidious and hard to shake, even across the veil between spirit and earthbound realms. Dave’s obsessions are skin-crawlingly squeamish, but what makes him frightening is his ability to belittle and dominate. It leaves viewers unsettled at the film’s end, mulling over exactly what makes a monster monstrous.
