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Doorstep is used with permission from Michael Capone. Learn more at
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A older couple is grappling with the disappearance of their missing daughter, when they get word of her location.
Together, the mother and father travel to a remote corner of Pennsylvania to retrieve her -- only to be confronted with her boyfriend at the doorstep with a gun. In the high-stakes pressure of the encounter, revelations surface, fracturing the reality between them all and changing lives forever.
Writer-director Michael Capone's short drama is a powerful, incisive snapshot of the moment that a family's understanding ruptures and explodes -- and the pernicious, poisonous secrets underneath the appearance of care and concern.
The short has a compressed narrative revolving around one tense confrontation, and it keeps its background information tightly controlled. And its creative approach is equally taut and economical, with focused, almost claustrophobic visuals, little background information in the writing, a minimal yet tense electronic score to develop its sense of unease.
Yet within its pared-down economy of elements, the film goes deep into a turning point in this family's life, using its deliberate and steady escalation of tension to squeeze out a dark secret -- and marking the moment that irrevocably changes the dynamic between all the members.
The excellent performances by the cast grant emotional specificity to each character, generating both understanding and suspense with careful and precise moments. Even the smallest blink has heavy portent, and once its secrets comes out, we as viewers experience their poison and torment as much as the characters involved.
"Doorstep" has a serious subject at its center, but at its core it's about the violation of trust and love that is supposed to be at the heart of family, and how it obliterates the sense of security and personhood of those who were violated. The film has a strong, almost brilliant way to represent the way a person can feel invisible and dehumanized by what's happened to them: here, the victim is given only one shot -- a POV -- in the film. Like the rest of the short, the creative decision is brutally simple in its concept and execution -- but says multitudes about how abuse can erase its victims with silence, secrecy and shame.
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A couple searches for their missing daughter. Then a secret spills out into the open. | Doorstep
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