Ed (Fiore Leo) wants to murder his wife Sarah (Leighsa Burgin) - not
because she isn't the perfect wife, she is, she is kind, she loves him,
never starts a fight or gives him reason to worry. But there is something
about her eye. Ed couldn't put his finger on what it is, it's just ...
something, and that something makes it uncomfortable to be close to her,
to sleep in the same bed, be in the same room with her - and this is
driving Ed crazy, crazy enough that he finds himself picking up a knife
repeatedly with the express intention to stab her. Usually he can stop
himself, and he is still level-headed enough to know what he was about to
do is wrong ... but one time, he just goes through with it and stabs his
wife to death. Ed has still not totally lost it, and he knows he has to
bury Sarah's body, thus drags it to a nearby forest to do so. He thought
this endeavor went undetected, but on the way home he is stopped by a bum
(William Bloomfield) who wants to blackmail him - so Ed kills and buries
him as well. During all of this, Ed thinks he can still hear Sarah's heart
beating ... At his house, Ed is visited by two cops (John Martellucci,
Michael Capozzi) who have been asked to investigate noises of a possible
domestic disturbance emanating from his house, basically because they just
were in the neighbourhood. Ed comes up with feeble excuse after feeble
excuse, but the cops swallow it, basically because they wouldn't know what
to suspect him of. Soon, the atmosphere becomes friendly, and they ask Ed
for a drink, and start telling anecdotes from their job, while Ed, still
plagued from the aftereffects of what he has done, falls more and more
apart - until, in an unexpected outbursts, he confesses everything. A
few hours later, the cops have recovered Sarah's body - but no trace of
the bum Ed claims to have killed ... A nice modern take on
Edgar Allan Poe's well-known The Tell-Tale Heart, this short may
not stick too close to the letter of Poe's story but instead remains true
to its atmosphere, as Christopher Di Nunzio understands his source
material (or inspiration, if you may) not so much as a story in the
traditional sense of the word, but as a moodpiece depicting one man's
descent into madness, seen through his very eyes - which without any major
special effects of the like, creates enough tension and suspense to keep
one on the edge of one's seat from beginning to end. Pretty fascinating,
actually.
|