REMAIN CALM (Short Film) Review: Smile Like Your Life Depends on It
By Devin Smock
SPOILERS THROUGHOUT
For whatever reason, the last few days have turned into a small horror-short festival.
Several notable ones have landed online almost on top of each other, and now here come the Lewis Brothers with Pauly Shore, Nick Swardson, Doug Jones and a monster that can smell anxiety. Sure. Why not?
REMAIN CALM, written and directed by Jake Lewis from a story by Jake and Sam Lewis, was released on YouTube October 12.
The whole thing runs a little over 14 minutes with credits. That is not much time to establish two characters, make them funny, introduce a creature, explain the rules and then make those rules pay off. The short wastes very little of it.
Matt and Erwin, played by Shore and Swardson, are working the night shift at Highway 50 Gas and Liquor. Matt wants to talk. Erwin mostly wants Matt to stop talking and let a conversation happen naturally, even though they have already spent two hours saying nothing. That exchange tells us almost everything we need to know about them. They are bored, slightly annoyed with each other and probably closer than either one would ever admit.
The dialogue and acting are outstanding right off the bat. I expected the Lewis Brothers, Shore and Swardson to be funny, but what I like is how little the short depends on us simply recognizing them. Shore is not just doing a Pauly Shore routine and Swardson is not walking in to deliver a louder version of one of his comedy characters. They play two actual night-shift clerks having a stupid conversation because there is nothing else to do. The timing is loose enough to feel natural, but the scene is still cut tightly. It is funny before the movie asks us to be scared, which turns out to matter.
Then Doug Jones walks in smiling.
Jones plays Grin Man, a government agent whose attempt to look reassuring has the exact opposite effect. He warns Matt and Erwin that something escaped from a facility in the desert. It reads body language, and if it senses stress or fear, it eats you. So the two clerks have one job. Stay calm. Stay happy. Keep smiling.
There is the movie. Simple, ridiculous and immediately useful. Horror shorts often spend half their running time setting up a final image or explaining a piece of mythology that does not need mythology. REMAIN CALM gives us one rule and starts tightening it. Watching someone try not to look afraid is already tense. Watching Pauly Shore and Nick Swardson try to look happy while a creature is crawling around a gas station is tense and funny at the same time.
The move from comedy into horror is handled really well. The short does not suddenly throw away the characters or become a different movie when Mr. Frett arrives. Matt and Erwin keep talking like Matt and Erwin. Their forced smiles become part of the scare, and their desperate attempt to calm themselves with a song, alcohol and whatever else comes to mind keeps the comedy inside the situation. The jokes are not interruptions. They are survival tactics, mostly bad ones.
There is also a little more going on underneath it if you want it. Erwin gets his information from endless scrolling. Matt gets happiness from processed chips. Then a smiling man from the government tells them everything will be fine as long as they keep looking happy while something awful moves around them. You do not need a shovel to dig that up. Thankfully, the movie does not stop to explain it either. It lets the idea sit there with the monster.
The filmmaking is much better than it needed to be for what could have easily looked like a comedy sketch with some blood added. Emil Gurvin’s cinematography, the color work by Cooper Shine and Alen Stubbs’ production design give the gas station its own look. The camera finds useful compositions in a place full of shelves, coolers, windows and narrow sightlines. The lighting has color and shape without making the store look like somebody rented a few tubes and pointed them at the walls. It looks like a movie.
More importantly, the camera knows when to show us something and when to make us wait. Once the short turns creepy, the ordinary layout of the store starts working against the characters. There are too many places to look and not enough room to get away. Jake Lewis and editor Jenna Socha let us search the frame with Matt and Erwin instead of cutting every half-second to remind us that a monster is nearby.
Kevin Keppy plays Mr. Frett, with creature design and practical effects by Gorgazma. The creature is appropriately creepy and strange without feeling disconnected from the fairly grounded world around it. Doug Jones, of course, can make one fixed smile feel like a threat before the threat even arrives. He is not in the short long, but Grin Man gives the whole thing its rule, its tone and one of its best uneasy laughs.
If I have a complaint, it is that the premise is so good and the performers work so well together that 14 minutes begins to feel like both the right length and not enough. Once the rule is explained, the short moves almost directly into the encounter and payoff. It is efficient, but I wanted one more turn of the screw, or one more surprise in how the creature uses fear against them. The government response at the end also wraps things up a little cleanly. Then Matt and Erwin look at the destroyed store and realize they are probably losing their jobs, which is exactly the dumb, human problem they would worry about after surviving something impossible.
REMAIN CALM is funny, genuinely creepy and far more polished than a celebrity-filled
YouTube short needed to be. It also understands the main thing some horror comedies forget: the horror still has to work. This does. I would gladly watch Shore and Swardson survive another night shift, another creature and another terrible conversation.
7.1/10
REMAIN CALM is streaming free on YouTube or watch below.
