UP/DOWN

Michael Cooke’s "Up/Down" is the kind of short film that unsettles not through spectacle but through stillness. At just eleven minutes, it occupies that fragile territory between life and death, memory and oblivion, where the rules are unclear and the stakes could not be higher. It is not a film about what happens, but about what it feels like to hover on the edge of existence, unmoored from certainty.

Cooke himself plays John, a man who wakes up in a sterile nowhere-space, stripped of context, of memory, of identity. There’s no grand exposition, no handrail for the audience to clutch onto. Instead, we are plunged into the same disorientation John inhabits—adrift in a room that feels more like a question than a setting. The performance is as stark as the space itself: quiet, restrained, never tipping into melodrama. John is less a character than a mirror for the audience, reflecting the dread and longing we carry when forced to consider what it means to have lived.

The cinematography by Kasparas Vidunes frames this ambiguity with unsettling precision. The waiting room feels sharp-edged, too clean, almost hostile in its neutrality. The space begins to weigh on you—like a cage without visible bars.

The editing fractures time, slicing the narrative into sudden flashes: glimpses of a wedding, moments of happiness, the heavy pull of despair. These intrusions don’t feel like flashbacks so much as aftershocks, fragments of a self that refuses to stay buried.

Hunter Bishop’s Angel appears not as comfort but as confrontation. His bluntness is unnerving, his detached questions a reminder that there is no easy reassurance to be found here. When he asks, “How was it?” the words sting like a judgment and an invitation all at once. The answer is impossible, and yet unavoidable. It is in this exchange that the film reveals its quiet ferocity: life, however messy or brief, demands to be accounted for.

What makes "Up/Down" linger is its refusal to close the loop. There is no neat moral, no soft landing. Instead, it leaves you with the echo of its central tension: the sense that we are all suspended between what we’ve done and what we might yet choose. Regret, memory, fleeting joy—they blur together, stripped of certainty but not of weight.

Cooke has crafted a short that feels less like a narrative than an encounter, something that brushes against the edges of your own fears. It’s not a film you watch to escape, but one you endure, and in enduring it, recognise something of yourself.