Rebecca

The boat looks decrepit, as if it hasn’t been on water in years. The visitor walks across an acre of sand towards it.

“I want you to come back to work,” he shouts.

The man on the boat, who is scruffy and unshaved, tells him to stuff his opinions up his arse. The visitor keeps talking. His words are carried away on the wind.

“Is that it then?”

“Well, it looks like it, don’t it?”

Nick Whitfield’s 12-minute short has a biting script with nothing to bite on. The depressed scruff is such a lost soul that empathy is impossible. Either he has damaged his mind, or renounced the comfort of a rented apartment for the battery-driven gloom of a damp cabin in a boat on stilts for the masochistic pleasure of self hatred.

When he sleeps she comes to him. Rebecca. Is she a spirit? Or a figment of his imagination?

The storyline has too many knots. The cynicism of the dialogue clashes with the romanticism of the ghost girl.

It is well played and well filmed. The plot has no resolution and, therefore, exists as a metaphor for failure.