[31 Days of Horror: Resurrection] Day 20 – You, Me & Her (2014)

Director: Sarah Doyle
Cast: Shannon Woodward, Tina Majorino, Paula Jai Parker, Nicholas Cutro
Screenplay: Sarah Doyle
20 mins. Not Rated.

Today, I wanted to spend some time looking at a short film, and I found an entire short film collection called Etheria over on Shudder. The series focused on emerging women filmmakers, and I decided on a short film from early on in the collection, You, Me & Her.

The plot of the short is quite simple: 30 alternate versions of the same woman, Anna (Shannon Woodward, The Haunting of Molly Hartley, TV’s Westworld), from different realities all end up at a place called the Department of Parallel Resettlement, and the Anna in our universe realizes all the ways she’s become the absolute worst version of herself from any reality.

This was an okay little short film, certainly well-done from a technical place. Writer/Director Sarah Doyle was able to juggle a lot of footage and keep the flow moving nice enough, even if the narrative falls off the rails by the end. The concept is simple, Doyle makes a few interesting notes about whether we would even want to see the world from a different perspective, if that would ruin our perception of self, and Woodward makes for an interesting and accessible lead character in Anna.

It’s just that screenplay doesn’t seem to justify 20 minutes, that Doyle’s technical skills are on display, but her ideas do run out of steam by the end, and I’m left wondering if there’s too much run time or not enough narrative thrust to account for it.

All in all, You, Me & Her is an accessible little short film that shows promise with a solid enough little character journey that will, at the very least, ask some compelling questions. It’s a little messy by the time it reaches the finale, but there’s some good in there too.

2.5/5
-Kyle A. Goethe