FUEL

Marc Cleary’s "Fuel" is a short that lingers like a half-swallowed memory—quiet, restless, and impossibly difficult to shake. At just twelve minutes, it folds us into the suffocating headspace of Wayne, a recovering bulimic returning home for Thanksgiving, where every plate and every glance feels weaponised against his fragile balance.

Austin Spacy, who also co-wrote, gives a performance so tightly wound it feels like he’s holding his breath for the entire film. His therapist’s voice trails through the cab ride like an anchor, a fragile tether to order and reason, but you sense from the beginning that it won’t hold against the tidal pull of family, ritual, and food. The brilliance of Cleary’s direction is in how he mirrors that inner unraveling with restraint rather than spectacle.

The dinner table scene, the film’s heart, is agonising not because of confrontation but because of silence—the slow push and pull of the camera, the way light isolates Wayne and then abandons him back into the chaos of clinking cutlery. It’s filmmaking that understands the violence of subtlety. Cooper Ulrich’s cinematography refuses to sensationalise, keeping us pressed into Wayne’s discomfort until even the air feels heavy.

What strikes hardest is how "Fuel" avoids the traps of the “issue film.” There is no melodramatic collapse, no grand catharsis. The restroom sequence, devastating in its quiet implosion, shows how relapse or temptation exists not as a plot point but as a lived, ongoing battle. Cleary insists on honesty: recovery is not triumph, it is endurance. And endurance does not make for a neat ending.

"Fuel" closes unresolved, refusing comfort, and that’s exactly its power. Life continues, the world keeps moving, and Wayne remains suspended between fragility and survival. It is a film that stares directly at discomfort and dares you to do the same. Thoughtful, unsettling, and quietly masterful—Cleary has crafted a work that stays with you long after the screen fades.