Still Life
Directed by Jon Knautz
Starring: Trevor Matthews
Uploaded July 27, 2006
Watch our review on Still Life
Logline: A pill-popping, over-caffeinated driver accidentally hits something. Panic-stricken, he searches for help in a strange and desolate town that offers very little in the form of human kindness.
Stills taken from Still Life (2024) Review by Hamp Overton
This fascinating horror short starring future Oscar-winning producer Trevor Matthews explores human behavior in the most tragic way.
We start with a tired young man, Nathan Evans (Matthews), as he drives through miles upon miles of empty Canadian highway. Snow patches cover the ground, and he struggles to stay awake by drinking coffee and taking pills.
His car is low on gas, so he pulls into the next small town and looks for a gas station. Distracted by what looks like a mannequin staring at him, he hits something in the road. Stopping immediately, he jumps out, only to discover another mannequin on the road behind his car. Confused, he heads into a café and finds it filled entirely of mannequins.
Hearing a siren, he looks out the café window and sees a different mannequin kneeling next to the one on the road. He turns around, and all the mannequins in the café are now facing him.
He runs to his car, but it won’t start. Hopping out, he sees that an ambulance is parked near the mannequin in the road. He hears chime of a shop door and sees a mannequin in a storefront doorway. He looks back at the ambulance and two additional mannequins dressed as medics are positioned behind the vehicle.
Baffled and frightened, he runs away, discovering mannequins throughout the small town, all staring at him. He hears a police siren and runs inside a house. There he finds a ‘family’ of three mannequins. The ‘father’ mannequin is holding a baseball bat, which the Nathan grabs and uses to destroy all three figures.
Looking at the destruction he has created, he hears a baby crying upstairs. He runs up the stairs just as he hears a police car come screeching to a halt outside. He looks out of a window and hears the police break down the front door. He pulls back from the window and stops, stunned. We see his reflection in a mirror: he is covered in blood. He drops the bat revealing that it is drenched in blood. He slowly raises his hands, and they are also covered in blood.
In complete shock, he turns as two policemen - not mannequins - appear in the doorway with guns drawn. Yelling at him to get down on the ground, they cuff him and lead him downstairs. As they head out the front door he looks to the family who are all real people now, bloodied and beaten to death.
This shocking psychological horror film gives us an unreliable narrator Nathan, who, in his drug-fueled exhaustion, fully believes the town’s population consists of mannequins. There are no ghosts, monsters or supernatural entities here. It is all too real, which forces us to consider a chilling question: could we also become unaware killers?