Midlands Review of Domestic Bliss
midlandsmovies • August 15, 2020
Domestic Bliss
Directed by Adam Whitehouse
2020
Red Setters Films
The clash of household drudgery against fantasy escapism are themes in a new semi-experimental short from Birmingham-born writer-director Adam Whitehouse that explores one woman’s flight into fantasy. But at what cost?
The 5-minute short opens with a woman (Hayley Doherty) sitting alone in a room, looking both concerned and reflecting on the boredom of her current repetitive lifestyle.
She is shown ironing and washing up in a life of isolation before a man, assumed to be her husband, shovels the dinner she has cooked him into his greedy mouth.
As he gulps down a bottle of beer, the wife looks on concerningly before she smokes a cigarette out in in her garden, looking stressed with her washing billowing on the line behind her.
Her colourful red hair and flowery dress are at odds with her demeanour, which is testament to well-chosen production design from Rachel Hubbard. This tone is mirrored in melancholy piano music scored by the director himself.
But soon she finds some crimson-topped mushrooms, cuts them up into a drink which she downs eagerly. On an hallucinatory head trip, the film has hints of Phantom Thread and fairy tale folklore as she escapes from her domestic drudgery.
However, we move into a more sinister space as she poisons her husband via a cooked meal and her ecstatic response is at odds with her partners’s intoxicated convulsions on the carpet.
Filmed in a fantastic widescreen 2:39 ratio, the shot quality is great from Whitehouse and fellow cinematographer Sam Bridges. And as the drugs take hold, the music turns into an ethereal choir of wind chimes which add aural colour as well as religious connotations. Is she ascending to a higher place or even descending into darker realms?
Mushrooms can often symbolise fertility but in Chinese culture also rebirth. In literature, they can also represent more negative aspects such as the “unexpected” and “secrets” given they grow in the dark.
And it is this darkness that permeates the ending of the film as we come full circle as she sits on the bed – this time dishevelled and in shock at what has occurred to her husband.
An excellent short with a cinematic gloss across all its technical aspects, Domestic Bliss is a more than rewarding short that takes the audience on macabre trip from the domestic into the divine with a hellish conclusion.
Michael Sales
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