Have you ever seen button training for animals? If you use Instagram or similar platforms, chances are you’ll have seen very smart pets like Bunny who have learned how to operate button mats, apparently communicating, sometimes in what seem to be whole sentences, with their loving owners – it’s fascinating to watch, but what’s clear is that Bunny (and many of the most prolific button-trained cats and dogs) have loving owners. And then there’s Mom & Max, the subject of Jordan Wippell’s whip-smart short film Obey! (2025), which is now available to watch on YouTube channel Alter (thank God for this channel taking an interest in short horror films) – here’s a link so you can check the film out for yourselves…
The restrictions on time (and money, and various other elements) are what can often make short film a fantastic indicator of style, substance and resourcefulness, and in just eleven minutes, Wippell is able to tell a pithy, modern supernatural horror story. Obey! gives us just enough to see that the @mom2themax Instagram page follows Max as he learns to operate buttons – with good levels of success – but something’s off. His owner talks more to her phone than to him, and although he’s a good boy, doing just what he’s been told, it seems to be more for clicks than to genuinely benefit his welfare (even though there seems to be the origins of a real connection there, somewhere in the rubble of becoming a shit-hot influencer). When something terrible befalls Max – who is first ignored by his owner as she indulges her vanity and chats with ‘a fan’ on her live feed, then harmed as he tries to follow a given command, no matter what – his owner seems distraught, but what is she distraught about, exactly? Is it Max, or is it her follower count? She’s pretty ready to pick up that phone when things start to get strange; has she not learned anything here?
The film is of course an update on a well-established genre of supernatural horror whereby the dead and maligned come back to set things straight; it’s updated here to include the phenomenon of button training, and given an additional element of empathy by reminding us that pets don’t care whatsoever for such vagaries as an internet presence, and simply want our undivided love and attention: Max’s transformation may seem harsh in some aspects, but it’s all done in the pursuit of some much-needed fairness, and the point is that we owe animals that much. That being said, the film measures its harsher moments very well against a far lighter, darkly comic introduction, encouraging us to laugh at the world we’ve built, right before being a little unnerved by it…
Enjoy the film! And many thanks to Jordan herself for the heads-up!