29 Palms: Astonishingly Taut Drama of an End

TW: depression, suicide

Brandon Shypkowski’s 29 Palms displays exemplary craft. A 20-minute drama about a couple who variously deny and confront their knowledge of each other, it reveals the limits of knowledge and along with them, the grace that sits beyond.

Yuuki (Chikako Fukuyama), on vacation with Josh (Shypkowski) to celebrate her recent award, has been thinking of dying. The slow and ostensibly interminable crawl of the dread signals its intention to take over everything.

Josh, unemployed, buoyant despite the loss of a father to suicide, blind to his partner’s crisis, enjoys a good joke at all times. Always occupied with hobbies, he is your quintessential happy-go-lucky guy.

But the buoyancy can only go so far. While the two manage to put together moments of endearing romance and affection, and even humour, the sense of waiting for something to happen, for the pot to boil over beyond salvaging, is inescapable. It seeps into everything, visible and sensible despite the many distractions of Josh, who really is charming despite his seeming tone-deafness. Fukuyama and Shypkowski both prove themselves immediately likeable. The unvarnished camerawork variously facilitates a sense of close knowledge and kinship.

While the cinematography takes a restrained approach, sound and silence play a more active role. The silence is a powerful thing here, a terribly empty feeling, a threatening presence. It suffuses the space with something awful and unuttered. Editing works like a ghost unceremoniously traversing through walls, cutting scenes short because they can yield nothing more even as they might have gone on.

This is how 29 Palms establishes itself as unforgettable: It stuns with every second of its duration, every frame it lingers on or leaves behind. A narrative so taut that the slightest movement reverberates with significance, the film’s climax is as skillful a crescendo as it is a devastating silence.

The film leaves room for the viewer to hear the thudding in their own ears, experience a quiet horror, scramble to remember what they saw and thought they knew, to recalibrate, and finally come up with nothing but the void that yawns in wait for people to resign themselves to it. No one watching comes away unscathed.

Watch 29 Palms Short Film Trailer