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Managing editor & film and television critic with a Bachelor's of Arts in English Literature with a Writing Minor from the University of Guam. Currently in graduate school completing a Master's in English Literature.
I am returning to cover Austin, Texas’s South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival, with my first review being Horse Brothers. This is a short film in the comedy and horror genres. Although it is possible that it can be considered a science-fiction and even thriller. Horse Brothers is written, directed, edited, and produced by Fabian Velasco and Milos Mitrovic.
There will be spoilers in this review, as the title of this article suggests.
Plot Synopsis
According to the SXSW website, here is the synopsis for Velasco and Mitrovic’s Horse Brothers.
Two brothers living on a farm sell old broken iPads, iPhones, and laptops to make ends meet. After one of the horses on the ranch convinces the older brother that the younger one is pinching a portion of the profits, the brother is left with no choice but to kill him and run off with the horse. Horse Brothers is a hilariously weird short film starring world-renowned arthouse filmmaker Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg, Forbidden Room) and Milos Mitrovic (Tapeworm, Stump the Guesser).
SXSW
Discussion
We begin and end this SXSW short film with Anton the Horse (Maddin) narrating his life on the ranch. He says, “This is a story about paranoia, greed, and envy, about dreams and nightmares in the age of technology”. The viewers see the brother (Mitrovic) approaching and feeding the Horse with a bucket of food in each hand. That is until Frodo arrives at the property with electronic devices.
He lays them out on the table, and what is particularly interesting about Henkel’s framing of the camera to frame Frodo’s face in reflections of the devices’ screens. This gives us frames within the larger frame. Crazy, right?
Frodo gives a handful of batteries, as payment, to his Brother, saying “I made a trade”. This is not what the Brother asked for, and he has a dream — or rather nightmare — of Frodo silhouetted at his bedroom doorway and bloody red light.
The Brother plans to travel to Italy with Anton, and he dumps the devices into the tub while Frodo bathes in the tub. I’m curious as to how the ending can be interpreted. Is Frodo truly alive, and is Anton an actual horse or a human-turned-horse?
The Cast and the Crew of Horse Brothers
Sam Singer portrays one brother, Frodo, while co-writer/ co-director/ producer Milos Mitrovic plays his brother. Guy Maddin voices “Anton the Horse”.
Markus Henkel serves as the cinematographer and colourist of the short film. Quan Luong serves as the assistant on camera.
Max Walter composes the music for Horse Brothers, as well as being the sound designer and re-recording mixer for the short film.
Velasco and Henkel work on the visual effects of the film; while Michael Nguyen serves as the sound FX editor.
From Reality to the Pseudoworld: Final Thoughts on Horse Brothers
My interpretation of his short narrative begins with the frames of Frodo within the screens and Henkel capturing this with the frame of his own camera. I can only perceive Frodo as the representation of a false world in which we, as a society, live. As Guy Debord writes at the beginning of his 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle, “[I]mages detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at”.
In the end, the Brother as a representation of reality, then, chooses to separate himself from Frodo. However, it is the Brother who is killed… At the hands of the Horse. This ending could be seen as the disintegration and death of our reality, as we know it, and the survival of this false world. I mean, how is it that Frodo is actually alive in the final scene. Also, since when do horses hold guns to kill human beings? Perhaps what is being shown to us is from the point of view of someone. What really happens may be different from the pseudoworld that we call the technologies of the digital age.
Fabian Velasco and Milos Mitrovic’s science-fiction horror-comedy short film, Horse Brothers, screens at South by Southwest next week!
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RELATED: Read our review of Sophie Mair and Dan Gitsham’s horror short from last year’s SXSW festival, The Thing that Ate the Birds!
Managing editor & film and television critic with a Bachelor's of Arts in English Literature with a Writing Minor from the University of Guam. Currently in graduate school completing a Master's in English Literature.
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