Dear Amazon Prime Video,
Your subscribers deserve more than this.
I don't know what this short film was hoping to be. That's if it had any hopes at all in the first place.
I guessed from the title, the synopsis and even right down to the font used, that this would be either an eerie, David Lynch-inspired tale of mystery or possibly a Twin Peaks spoof.
Great! Either would be perfect for me. I love David Lynch and Twin Peaks. I also love the short film medium and I enjoy a good bit of light-hearted parody as much as anybody.
Unfortunately, Twin Trees doesn't turn out to be a parody or pastiche because that would involve humour. And there isn't any of that here. None. At all.
Weird.
And I don't mean "weird" as in being anything approaching Lynchian. There is no influence from Mr. Lynch here in the slightest (apart from the artless mimicking of a set piece or two).
No, it's just weird as in "Why the hell is this considered watchable content by Amazon. Or anyone?".
I'd like to think that even a drop-out from a second-rate film school making their sole attempt at a short movie would stitch some semblance of a story together for their project.
But sadly there is absolutely no storytelling going on at any point in this video.
Even the most mysterious, surreal, dream-like, hallucinatory film sequence requires a story, no matter how oblique or ambiguous that story might be.
The actors featured here may be talented. But we'll never know from watching this because, similar to the lack of humour and the lack of story, there is a severe lack of acting going on here too.
Aren't actors there to inhabit a character? Merely appearing onscreen doesn't make a person a character any more than an inanimate peice of furniture might be considered a leading role.
So, if a filmmaker has no original thoughts to convey, and produces five minutes of poorly executed material with no story, no drama, no trace of humour and no characters ... does this even qualify to be described as a film of any kind?
That's the real mystery here, folks.
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