Cheat

A darkened room. A leather sofa, a standing lamp, a table with a vase of flowers. This is still life, yet it's complicated by the materials, by the lighting, the black background; it's using the language of horror. The dislocated whispering which constitutes the only dialogue invites us to perceive it as a ghost story, and indeed this film was made in response to a death - that of a woman who took her own life when her family rejected her because of her sexuality. When the vase of flowers moves, it's easy to attribute it to some supernatural force, yet it's also symbolic of the disruption of the domestic, the disordering of an image of a respectable family home by something that challenges familiar rules.

A clock ticks in the background. Again, there is that constancy of expectation. When it pauses, it jolts the viewer's thoughts, disorientating like Chinese water torture. "Don't stop loving me," says the voice from outside time, as if addressing the furniture or the family who ought to be sitting there, together.

Something of a fixture in Scotland's LGBTIQ filmmaking community, Ania Urbanowska is at her most interesting when producing experimental work, not least because she knows how to construct such films sparingly rather than trying to throw everything into them as some short filmmakers do. Cheat has the consistency of a poem, an idea with broad societal reach compressed into as small a space as possible. The result is potent, potentially explosive, like a love kept secret for too long. The ticking clock reminds us that somewhere, out there in the real world, this story is sill being told.