It's Not About Fear (10:06)
IMDb; Vimeo; YouTube

This 2023 short film was presented by Alter in 2023.

So... Alter is a channel for horror shorts, and this definitely seems like one of those for most of its runtime. But toward the end I came to think of it more as a drama... about something horrific. (Maybe I should have filed it under "horror", I don't know.)

A woman named Lena goes to the home of a man named James, whom she's been dating for awhile now. We can see that a creepy, shadowy figure has been haunting him, and both James and Lena seem a bit nervous about their date, especially James. Eventually he has a panic attack, and Lena comforts him, by sharing a plot twist I didn't see coming. It recontextualizes everything about the short, and shows us that these two have something deeply traumatizing in common in their pasts.

Well, I thought it was an excellent short film, even if I couldn't manage to love it. I sort of feel like I shouldn't even try to rate it at all, but I have done so anyway. If I were rating it strictly on quality, it would probably have been a higher rating. It's just... it hits hard, once you understand what's actually going on. It's not a fun or easy watch, but it's really good.