Echo Review

Echo was a short film made in 2011 and directed by Lewis Arnold. In this film a girl pretends to get phone calls saying that her dad has been in an accident, and keeps conning people in the street into believing this story. In the opening wide shot, we are introduced to a scene in a busy street and we hear the sound of an ambient crowd, creating an objective feeling. We aren't actually even aware at first of who our main protagonist is going to be, and it feels as though we ourselves as audience members are the people in the street watching the scene play out. For a lot of the call at the start, we see just one shot playing out. The actors' performance was so convincing that because for a lot of it the camera was hidden, normal people in the street came up to her to see if she was alright. There is quite a restricted colour palette, which remains throughout the film, with lots of grey tones.

By the second phone call we see of this girl, we have been given more information, and now know that it is a con and that her dad isn't actually in the hospital. However, we don't know why she is doing it, whether it is for money or another reason. We see this call from the perspective of the younger brother, who is as in the dark as the audience about what she is doing. Since the first call, we've been introduced to the girls' mum and brother, and have discovered that she is very distant from them, and is quite moody from home. We are shown how isolated she feels by seeing shots of her smoking outside her house, and sitting alone in a café.

Between the second call and the last call we get given more information about the girls' family, and find that her dad was actually in an accident and was killed by getting knocked off his bike. This makes what she is doing more impactful for an audience member, since we know that this has happened for real in the past, and she is forcing herself to relive it for some reason; maybe as part of her grieving process or maybe as a form of emotional self harm. In this sequence, the editing is much more fast paced with lots of quick shots, and the camera uses lots of close ups to show the raw emotion on the girls face. They did this to show how even though it isn't real, the panic and the trauma is the same every time, and it's always just as bad.

There is a slightly cyclical structure to this film, given that we start and end on the same events being played out, and there is a sense of repetition. The phone calls seem to be a never ending cycle, and we see at the end that she hasn't really changed, and she is still doing it and she may never stop. This means that there is no sense of resolution for and audience member.

I liked this sense of repetition in the film, and the idea of repeated images throughout to convey meaning. I may use aspects of this idea in my own work. Stereotypes are also used, especially in terms of the girl being a moody teenager (even though we later discover there is more to the story of why she seems so isolated), and I may try to use slightly stereotypical motifs in my own film due to how it is a short film, and doing this can help get an idea of character across to an audience quickly. I also felt that the film was quite close to being social realism, which is a genre I am thinking of using.