‘The Scarecrow’ is a sum of fears, a brutal incision in a mind that is too deep and foggy to be cleared out by light. It looks like you can go in, but you can never get out. Leah Pollack went through the dictionary of nightmares, picked up one randomly, and made the most out of it. The fear of the past hunting the present is way to common these days in cinematography, and we’ve had many examples even in this festival, but Pollack’s approach is slightly different, and altogether both interesting and ravishing.

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The use of black and white set the path of this short horror movie, making it unexpectable and intense. The feeling we’ve experienced whilst watching ‘The Scarecrow’ was the same one a person experiences when the car lights go blind and the road is covered in a deep dense fog – you have to go further, but you have absolutely no idea what is there. The visceral interpretation was a great achievement for this short movie, enhancing the passive-aggressive mood; each and every scene had its own pulse and it was raising minute after minute till the end when it suddenly stopped in the most theatrical and mindblowing way.

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What we really appreciated in 'The Scarecrow' was the editing – for a narrative that tends to skip bars like an old vintage vinyl player, the story was cursive, and it maintained the old-school aspect that reminded us of the cult classic ‘Eraserhead’. Leah Pollack may have hit the jackpot with the technique used in this short and so we are definitely eager to see it in a feature movie as the director proved that she has talent and a great vision. The only thing missing right now is a great feature to project her in the big league of filmmaking.

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Written by Vlad A. G