MY LITTLE NOTHING

Two seemingly distinct spaces: what could be a contemporary teenage girl’s computer screen that composes sentences as she types, and the view of a landscape, the density of a forest, over which a metallic, breathless voice echoes. What appears to be natural turns out to be suspiciously artificial (more desktop wallpaper?), and the distinction between inside and out blurs. In spite of all this, a dialogue unfolds between the two spaces. The first cut from one to the other, after only a few seconds, gives us the shivers, but the weirdness also arises from what the voices are saying, the subject of the conversation itself. The shiver is coupled with a smile: the teenage girl asks the voice for its hand in marriage, and the voice belongs to none other than the Devil.

With the conceptual approach that characterises her work, in her new short film, Lucy Kerr — Crashing Waves (FID 2021); Site of Passage (FID 2022) — pursues her exploration of genre cinema’s blind spots. The reductionism - the simplification - brings an unacknowledged violence to the surface. Horror ceases to be a backdrop and becomes, like in a Lovecraft story, a central figure. Here, materials borrowed from gothic cinema, teen movies, slashers and even science fiction come together into a hybrid object not unrelated to today’s debates on the mirages and hallucinations of artificial intelligence… although, in fact, it all starts with a book: the diary that Mary MacLane kept in 1901 in Butte, Montana. The nineteen-year-old, shut away in her bedroom, recorded her willful expectation, foreshadowed by the book’s title and no doubt shared by many women before and after her: I Await the Devil’s Coming.
Manuel Asín