Much is made in supernatural horror of what is seen or unseen, but so much of what scares us is down to what we hear – or think we hear. Using that idea, Last Words (2023) is an effective short film which, although it tantalises several ideas regarding the source of its horror, is ultimately frightening through what it does with sound. It may have a very different location – unfolding its horror for the main part in a sunny, bright and starkly beautiful setting – but it’s reminiscent of The Signalman, with the same, ominous voice carrying uncannily across the divide.
We start in medias res – never a bad idea in a short film with a limited timeframe – and we encounter Kira (Ché March), a hiker who has just fallen down a stony ravine. She’s able to stand, but she has injured her ankle. Her friend Max (Nick Luberto) thankfully manages to spot her from above, and suggests he’ll come to her. It’s not the best of ideas, given how treacherous the drop is, so Kira begins to make her way along her new path, presumably looking for the safest route back – for both of them. However, as she shuffles along, she spots someone else. There’s a young man, watching her. She instinctively calls out to him for help but he responds passively, only pressing a finger to his lips to gesture for her to be quiet. It’s a simple and strangely uncanny gesture; Kira is unsettled, but as this strange few seconds unfold, she hears Max – and now it sounds as though he is the one needing help. This is one of the ways the film subverts expectations: here, the person who has fallen is not, at least initially, the person at the most risk.
Sound has now overtaken sight as the key means of interacting with the world. As sunny and as bright as it is, Kira is dependent on Max’s voice; she may as well be in the dark. Hearing him cry out in alarm only fills her with more urgency to reach him. But none of this feels right: the sound of his voice has become uncertain, unsettling. If he cried out in pain just now, how can he now be calling out to her, semi-normally? She has no choice but to try her best to get back to her friend, but what will she find when she does?
If the odd moment in this film – a key reveal, in fact – looks a little tried-and-tested in terms of its appearance and make-up effects, then it hardly matters when looked at against the film as a whole. This is very nicely pared down, works well within the nine minute (or so) runtime and directors Teal Greyhavens and Nikolai Von Keller understand that you can get a great deal from an essentially simple idea – here, the uncanny horror of a displaced voice. This is the film’s real strength, although the end sequences suggest the presence of a myth or mythos of some kind, some barely-glimpsed orchestrator, lurking in the film’s rare dark corners. The film is genuinely creepy where it presents the audience with its voiceless watchers, and it produces some truly effective scenes along these lines. Best of all, Last Words is available to watch on Alter right now. Have at it.