Lenylson Luan Gomes is a smart and cultivated director, and 'The Hat' is all the proof we needed to sustain this idea. In this forty minute movie, Gomes incorporates all the film techniques Hollywood managed to develop in the last sixty-seventy years. We will try to foreground some of them in this review, and also to talk about the value they get when mixed in a movie that is very hard to be categorized by genre.

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First of all we were struck by the shady filming technique, with darker / vintage hints on the edges, making it look like a profound movie, a subject that came to amaze the viewer by being all so sophisticated. Also, the sound effects are the ones very common in horror movies and thrillers, movies where the narrative deals with issues that require audio medium to complete the cinematic quest. Another thing that caught our attention was the futuristic side, where the messages were displayed on the main screen making it easy for the viewer to be part of the story. Even though the movie was made in Brazil, the main actor was speaking in English, a very weird type of English and not at all natural, being oddly ridiculous almost every time he had a line. The moments when we were deeply impressed were the timelapses, a certain technique that had nothing to do with this kind of movie, but it was executed impeccably.

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The cinematography was sloppy and it looked like it was made in a rush just to be in time for the upcoming festivals that were yet to start. The main actor has moments when he proves that he knows what good acting is, but because this “short” is rather a featurette than a short film per se, these moments are tending to be foreshadowed by other elements that are not at all at the same level of professionalism.

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All in all, 'The Hat' is a short with a good idea, but the overall working method is a giant mix of styles that have nothing to do one with the other, and leave this movie to be just a poor experiment that has only personal and maybe, symbolic value.

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Written by Vlad A. G