The Mistake: A Drama of Sibling Rivalry and What We Do to Be Seen

Artii Smith’s The Mistake is a drama with psychological thriller undertones to it as two brothers clash and meditate on the diverging paths that led them to where they are when the film opens: one a medical student, the other with a dead body on his floor and coke traces under his nose.

Matthew (Brian Loud) wants it to be a dream, that there is a dead woman lying forgotten by his bed. To think of it that way, the rest of the movie proceeds as though with the logic and brutal swoop of actions in dreams. It is as if our brains recognise that there are no stakes here, only restrained emotions to let out, and so we act without reservations in dreams. Here, Matthew wants and behaves the same.

He has called for his brother, a complicated equation of a relationship in which Matthew is the irresponsible, older, white, and adoptive child while Jason (Zach Feiner) is brown, biologically related, unshackled by mental torment, and thereby receptive to academic and professional success. The resentment is deep. The plot crescendos through about two and a half additional characters (Alex Elin Goyco, Tiffany Coffey, and Robyn Stephenson who is both the corpse and the seen but not heard woman next door in a narratively potent use of casting) into tangible disaster, and the deepening of old wounds and earning of new ones, until Matthew is even less recognisable than when we were first introduced to him.

The writing competently develops the story into two plotlines that sometimes interweave, sometimes run parallel. Occasionally one overtakes the other (its own kind of sibling rivalry) and goes back into the past that can worsen the future while doing absolutely nothing for the crisis at hand. And thus, a well-written plot. It is turned into its best version by the editing, which shapes the plot into a neatly constructed and paced drama, if a little hindered by the acting. The events and their seemingly inevitable progress makes the spacious duplex feel suffocating—there are too many people, dead or alive or incorporeal, and nowhere for Matthew to go for grace, let alone peace. You may not sympathise with the fellow, but you do pity him.

Watch The Mistake Short Film Trailer