Safe - Govind Chandran | Written by: Govind Chandran & Kelsey Cooke | Runtime: 21 minutes | Genre: Drama
Synopsis: When a helpline counsellor begins to suspect a caller is hiding something far more dangerous than self-doubt, she must decide whether to trust her gut or risk letting silence swallow a cry for help.
What does it mean to truly hear someone? Not just their words, but the fear threaded through them, the silences that ache louder than speech, the fragility of a voice trying not to crack. "Safe" lives in that quiet, impossible space — where compassion collides with responsibility, and where a single decision might hold the weight of someone else’s life.
Govind Chandran’s short film doesn’t unfold with spectacle or obvious drama. Instead, it traps us in the limbo of a phone call, where one woman’s instincts wrestle against protocol, and another woman’s pain filters through the line like a signal in danger of cutting out. It is cinema stripped to its essentials: a face, a voice, and the unbearable tension of what hangs between them.
Kelsey Cooke, as Iris, bears the burden of being our only on-screen presence, and she holds us with a performance of quiet strength and unspoken doubt. The camera doesn’t flinch away from her stillness — the flicker in her eyes, the breath caught in her throat — and in that intimacy we feel the full exhaustion of someone trying to carry another’s safety on their shoulders. Opposite her, Fran St Clair’s voice work is devastating: fragile, hesitant, filled with half-truths and interruptions that suggest whole worlds of danger beyond what is said aloud.
"Safe" never shows us violence. It doesn’t need to. The violence is in the waiting, in the listener’s helplessness, in the possibility that warning signs could go unnoticed until it’s too late. That restraint makes the film more harrowing, not less — because it forces us to sit in the same uncertainty Iris does, piecing together shadows of a story and wondering what will happen if she doesn’t act.
Even in its moments of beauty — the soft score by Benjamin Doherty, the brief, haunting cutaways — the film doesn’t offer easy catharsis. It lingers instead on the truth that listening is its own act of courage, and that sometimes the smallest flicker of recognition, the willingness to take someone’s pain seriously, can mean survival.
At 21 minutes, "Safe" is more than a short film. It’s a reminder of how fragile trust can be, how much strength it takes to reach out, and how much more it takes to answer that call with care.
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