YOU'RE THE STRANGER HERE (2009) - ♦♦♦♦♦

Directed by - Tom Geens

Written by - Tom Geens

Starring - Kate Cook, Anthony Smee, Ella Peel, Michael Andrew

"You're the Stranger Here is a remarkable short film where everything, from narrative to style and setting, can have more interpretations that one, depending on the point of view of each individual viewer. It follows a woman with leg spasms, living in a fascist regime where people with crazy legs are shot. 

Despite the fact that its storyline has a beginning, a middle and an end - a conventional structure, so to speak - there is nothing conventional about the succession of events, where familiar settings and situation are constantly injected with some type of cinematic cocaine by director and writer Tom Geens, progressively playing with surrealist allegories. The aggressive effect that this contrast creates is enhanced by the style in which it is shot, in distinctive VHS-like luminance, restrictive use of dialogue and by the merciless use of loud distorted electronic music, which particularly conveys the violence of the film's storyline and atmosphere, both in the outside world and in its domestic setting. 

You're the Stranger Here is driven by a desire to provoke and disturb, a desire that evokes such filmmakers as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and in its just over 15 time span, it manages to do just that."

Drama, UK