From Omeleto.
A mother searches.
At the end of the 12th century, King Richard I of England became embroiled in the Holy Crusades. But the war has come at a huge cost, leaving one mother to search the ruins of a recent battle for her son. She searches churches full of injured soldiers battling a "madness," inquires with priests — but no one can help her.
Left to her own devices, she goes to the battlefield, where the earth recently erupted in flames. There, she will find more than her son — she will discover the true nature of the enemy, one determined to destroy the earth and its people, no matter what their faith.
Directed and written by Shaddy Safadi, this animated horror short has an almost epic sweep, using 3-D animation to evoke the doom and hellfire of the medieval age and the all-encompassing danger of a hellishly supernatural force that awakens. With a visual dynamism and storytelling propulsion that would not be out of place in today’s blockbusters, it leans into atmosphere and allegory, its richly stylized imagery prioritizing mood, symbolism, and jaw-dropping spectacle. The result is imaginative, intriguing and terrifying, even in the truncated duration of a short format.
The spine of the story is simple, as a mother searches for her son after a recent battle. However, her search allows viewers to travel through the story’s world, taking us into a deeply devout but frightened village and a foreboding church full of injured soldiers, grappling with injury and madness. This is a deeply religious world with little to offer hope or comfort except faith, and the dialogue deftly captures this worldview, as well as an impending sense of apocalypse felt by this world’s inhabitants, who can only look to God to save them.
But even that faith will be tested when the mother — performed by voice actor Sinead Phelps — confronts the fate of her son. It’s a diabolical vision, baroque in its detail and scope and almost painstakingly Biblical in its evocation of evil. Unlike the muscle-bound monsters of today that terrorize with brute force, this Devil is overwhelming and all-consuming in scope, threatening to rise and walk the earth, destroying everything in its path.
Ambitious, sweeping and fully realized in its world-building and atmospheric complexity, DIABOLI is a proof-of-concept short produced under the auspices of One Pixel Brush, one of gaming’s most respected concept art studios, which has worked on games such as CALL OF DUTY and THE LAST OF US. That experience has given the visuals a particularly cinematic approach, with movements and shots that have considerable muscle. But most of all, the worldbuilding provides a worthy canvas for its visual approach, dealing with faith, horror, history and mythos in a historical setting ripe for exploration in a larger narrative format. We may surmise the fate of the mother and son in the short, but the larger world of the film is a tantalizing mystery, one ready to be expanded upon with rich results.
DIABOLI. Courtesy of Shaddy Safadi at https://onepixelbrush.com.
