It is hard to do most art mediums effectively in a short span of 12 minutes, whether it is writing a story, making a song, or paint a picture. Film, on the other hand, can allow you to do something well in a very short time, but it still takes a skilled hand. One of the hardest things in film with a short time frame is to make the audience care. Making them care about the characters, situation, or world can be a task that even some full features can not achieve. The Rat was a film that not only made me care enough about the characters and situation to invest me but it was immersive enough to make me turn off my lights so I could experience it even better.

Opening on Renee, a young woman running during the day the film suddenly transitions to her in a black dress at night being picked up by her boyfriend Jim in a pickup truck. After stopping for a few puffs off of Jim’s joint he takes her to an abandoned house to get some privacy. After some intimate kissing, Jim convinces Renee that a dirty mattress would be a fine place to have sex but he has to go get a condom first. While he is gone she begins to hear creaking through the house and begins to become frightened. While she is investigating the house looking for Jim she catches the sight of herself half-naked in a dirty old mirror just before a man wearing a rat mask catches her.

The beauty/ horror of The Rat is as the audience we feel like we are watching a very personal and very upsetting moment in a person’s life. With the combinations of some incredibly ambient sounds, tight cinematography, and an almost claustrophobic setting, we are trapped in the situation with Renee. Without spoiling any of the plot the short bookend itself with Renee once again running with the first swell of upbeat music implies, to me at least, that as awful as this situation was, it is not something that is going to stop her. It is a fantastic short that shows you don’t need fancy special effects or a feature-length run time to create an intimate story that people can care about.