Dir. Tonjia Atomic and Michelle Nessk (2019)
Two sisters go missing after a road trip to Vegas. This is their story, intercut with their mother’s impassioned plea for help finding her daughters.
CAUTION: MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
Filmed as part of a blood drive charity event, Tonjia Atomic and Michelle Nessk challenged each other to make a short film using a cellphone and only one take per scene. While this leads to a few bumps from time to time, this sort of experimental filmmaking is fascinating and surprisingly well done. With a super-tiny budget and an even smaller cast, 333: Illuminaughty follows a mother who is looking for her missing daughters. It’s a found footage film, with the mother’s pleas for help intercut with scenes from a trip taken by the daughters before they disappeared. The found footage is excellent, and with today’s age of social media, largely also being filmed on cellphones, it feels pretty real. None of it feels like “acting,” it just feels like two dumb girls who accidentally get in way over their heads. The scene in the elevator is genuinely creepy as fuck, and the whole thing is done incredibly well. Interesting short, worth checking out, and available for free on YouTube!
