Unveiled review

By Simon Thompson

Legendary director Stanley Kubrick was reported to be in awe of Nescafe adverts because he was amazed at how they could tell a complete story within one minute. The very same principle can be applied to director Ryan Graff’s short film Unveiled, which manages to take one of the great age- old horror fundamentals of a protagonist hearing an unnerving noise and going to investigate it and still inspire genuine shock and uneasiness right up until the movie’s climax. 

Graff is a director who really understands that a lot of the best horror stories revolve around the audience seeing the characters going about their daily tasks (in this case the protagonist brushing her teeth) only for it to be interrupted by a loud noise, some kind of gruesome monster, or a guy built like two Sherman tanks on top of each other wielding a machete. After the initial shot of seeing the heroine getting ready for bed, Graff carefully builds tension using a combination of diegetic and non-diegetic sound with the mixture of hearing a tap running fused with the Lynchian industrial soundtrack having me right on the edge of my seat to the extent that the back of my neck slightly hurts. 

Graff also has a sharp understanding of the power of tight and claustrophobic camera angles: almost every shot in Unveiled apart from the opening one is almost, near to or is a close up, and this really adds to what Graff is trying to achieve in immersing the audience within the unsettling narrative of the movie. 

To conclude, Unveiled is a cinematic testament to the principle that sometimes the simple approach to storytelling is the best way to construct a story, as in two minutes and six seconds Graff perfectly executes a set-up and a payoff better than a lot of directors can do in an hour and a half. Unveiled is a minimalistic short-film horror masterpiece which has justifiably been nominated for and won a ton of awards on the festival circuit: if you’re in the market for a short and sharp shock seek this one out at your earliest convenience.