The Pause

Directed by Sam Grierson

2025

So Crocodile Ltd.

The Pause sees the return of local writer-director, and Midlands Movies Awards nominee, Sam Grierson, whose new short tackles tangible mid-life anxieties using the often anxiety-filled genre of horror.

A funky and freaky soundtrack opens the film as we are introduced to Charlie (Suzy Bloom) a lady with a set of growing fears stemming from a recent redundancy.

As she analyses herself in a bathroom reflection, a voiceover describes some of her concerns, but it is joined by a diabolical double – a sort of secondary and sinister inner-voice conscious who undermines her daily routine with disparaging comments.

Interestingly, what on the surface appears to be a wholly introspective domestic drama soon morphs into a horror-hopping set of sequences where dread is manifested in tropes from the genre.

A black cat called Mr. Puddle (perhaps a “missed the puddle” analogy - a conscious being that’s more like a puddle adapting to its environment) is one of many macabre elements we see that heightens our attention towards panic and fear.

An early dream-like sequence sees Charlie lose her teeth into a sink (which reminded me of Seth Brundle in The Fly), and as she feels trapped, a shower curtain moment is filmed like Psycho and this pastiche style continues as we go along. We are shown basement scares, a man looking for help and our protagonist being followed at night later on.

Yet these are extremely "meta" as the two voices break the fourth wall and refer to the fact these are well-known stereotypical scenes. In fact it reminded me of the similar self-referential tone seen in Scream and Cabin in the Woods. Unlike those films' satirical swipes however, here they provide a sense of someone failing to understand the world as things change around them. With the expected horrors never arriving.

The technical elements of the short are good and cinematographer Gary Rogers does a great job capturing Charlie as she heads to a graveyard. With her jacket hood masking her face, we get a host of well-shot Dutch angles and smoky silhouettes harking to the frights of Hammer horror.

Constantly turning the tables on expectations, it repeatedly teases with frights but 'rug-pulls' these throughout. Will this sequence be the really horrific one? Yet it does a good job of exploring transformation, as well as mirroring the uneasiness of lifestyle and age-related changes along the way.

The second half sees Charlie meet with her friend Sammi (an excellent Louise Osbourne) for an extended conversation at a bar. Unfortunately, I felt that during their chat the short's themes are spelled out far too overtly, which is a bit of a – pardon the horror cliché myself – hammer over the head really.

To be fair though, the dialogue itself references whether the horror elements are still relevant but even with that, it still had a feeling of a short of two contending halves.

Coming off the back of The Programme (our review here), the director is once again exploring issues close to their own heart. With some Charlie Kaufman flourishes and a strong knowledge of film history also added to the mix, the short certainly takes some well-calculated risks to illuminate its ideas.

For me, a tighter second-half away from its explanations would have had a greater impact, but despite this small reservation, The Pause is as a very intriguing production that tackles topics around identity and mid-life relevance.

And it successfully exploits the horror genre to make its point about how to come to terms with, and face up to, a host of scary issues ending as a first-rate journey that uses fictional dread to delve into truthful angst.

★★★★

4 / 5

Michael Sales

@midlandsmovies