COLOURED EMOTIONS

Victor Oly has a knack for capturing emotional turbulence with a distinct, off-kilter intensity. With "Coloured Emotions," his latest short film, he reteams with writer Ben Milligan and actor Jack Copland to explore the jagged edges of post-breakup despair. The result is a 9-minute whirlwind that oscillates between comedy and raw, unfiltered anguish, delivering a viewing experience that is as unpredictable as it is compelling.

The setup is deceptively simple—Mitchell and Faye reunite at a bar a year after their split, because Faye wants to retrieve her belongings from their old apartment. But simplicity ends there. Mitchell is a man on the edge, clinging to nostalgia like a life raft, while Faye just wants closure. What follows is less a conversation and more a collision, as Mitchell’s refusal to move on spirals from the darkly amusing to the deeply unsettling.

Copland, once again, proves to be Oly’s secret weapon. His Mitchell is manic, magnetic, and emotionally fraying at the seams—a man whose heartbreak has festered into something almost theatrical. Every expression, every gesture teeters between desperate charm and unhinged unpredictability. Luna’s Faye is a crucial counterweight. She carries the weariness of someone who has already had this conversation in her head a thousand times before ever stepping through that door. There’s an unspoken history in the way she looks at Mitchell, a tired patience that makes her performance quietly devastating.

Milligan’s script crackles with tension, layering witty banter with an undercurrent of unspoken grief. Every line has double meaning—what’s said is never quite what’s meant. And Tobias Scavenius’ cinematography complements the chaos; shifting angles, restless framing, and an increasingly claustrophobic visual language trap us inside Mitchell’s spiraling psyche.

Oly clearly has a talent for exposing the wounds people try to hide (Pink Rabbit and The Whipping Boy both explored emotional vulnerability in starkly different ways), but "Coloured Emotions" feels like his most viscerally immediate work yet. It’s a fever dream of heartache—funny, uncomfortable, and, by the time the credits roll, profoundly affecting.