LOVEFIELD

I found this short film on Future shorts called Lovefield directed by Mathieu Ratthe. its got a very interesting style to the film as it combines many different genres including: drama/horror and thriller. By combining these different genres the film manages to play with our minds and makes us think that the ending will be different. At the beginning there is noway that you can tell the story line but by the end its very clear. She's been driving along the road and her water has broken so she stops the car and finds a place amongst the crops to lie down. There is a tractor and a man who watches this incident and tries to help her, he gets a knife and cuts the umbilical cord and then gets a blanket from her car to wrap the baby in. Then we see the woman and her baby. However the narrative is told in a very different way its told in a make believe way so that we think she is murdered or raped as it starts with us seeing blood and a phone ringing on the floor which makes us wonder whats happened. There are two clear binary opposites in this film which are the lighting and the music, with the lighting when its the dark side of the film when it begins it is dark lighting and makes us feel scared and then at the end when we see the baby the lighting brightens up to lighten the atmosphere. The second which is when the music starts its a screechy high pitched sound over the squarks from the crow and then at the end its juxtaposed and the music is a soft piano sound. Then there is another binary opposite which is not so obvious which is the fact that we think the woman is dying but actually a baby is being born. One of the reasons we see this film as a horror at the beginning is that the man in the film is a typical southern American farmer whose wearing stereotypical dungarees and he has tattoos up his arm and our immediate reaction is that he is evil and mysterious. But we learn at the end not to always judge a book by its cover as we were very wrong! A few other reasons for our expectations at the beginning of the film is the fact that the knife made the audience jump as it hit the ground, the crow which is used to create tension and also the fact that when the man looks in the car boot there is a point of view shot which makes it seem like there is someone already in the boot who he's caught already and we presume she is next. We were very wrong!