Dicesision (2023) – 1/5

I suggest you make the decision to skip the watch here

„Dicecision“ is, despite the English-sounding made-up word title (a mix of two words?), a German German-language live action short film from 2023 and this one is even from November 2023 and we still have November, so it is only two weeks old or something now. It runs for 6.5 minutes and I would add a „luckily“ because you can see from my rating that I was not a fan of the outcome here really. But first things first: The director is Yorick Kondriniewicz and this is his third short film. I would it say it is okay if you struggle early in your career as some of the greats have as well, but I would also say we have reached a point where improvement needs to happen eventually to justify a career in the industry as there were several years between his first and second as well as his second and third work, namely this one here. I have not seen the previous two, but this one here did not win me over at all. Anyway, there are two other writers, so you could say that it maybe a case of too many cooks spoiling the brother, especially for such a short film. Maybe one person would have been enough and this one person could have succeeded better in getting through their vision. These two other writers are by the way also actresses you see in the film itself and one of them is lead actress Flavia Graber.

We have a woman here who quickly changes locations in this film and in every location she has an encounter with exactly one other person. You cannot be sure what is happening. Is she dreaming? Is there something supernatural going on? Is she under the influence? There is no clear solution to that. There is not supposed to be. It still did nothing for me. With these changes of location, I had to thin of the film „The Father“ where it also only happens in the main character’s head, but let’s get back to this movie. Most of the quick scenarios in here are fairly haunting for the main character and she feels uncomfortable, not right away every time, not even with the strange bald guy in the tunnel or what it is, but eventually. She also ends up in a boxing ring and with a guy at a hospital. Mental hospital? There I was surprised that she even asked him if he was okay before understanding that it was another uncomfortable situation there. I actually thought that maybe the guy in yellow there was going through what she was going through too, but this only could have been the case if there were indeed supernatural events going on and not if it was all in her head.

Anyway, towards the end, the story progresses and we see all the characters together, some being there, others fighting. Again, no idea how it came to that. The parallel between those characters and what is in her fridge was one of the better moments from the movie, but really only because everything else was so weak, not because it was a particularly good twist. The only question for me is if this was merely a poor and forgettable film or if it was really bad. Right now, I have to go with the latter. There wasn’t a single component or value really from the entire production that won me over here, but the biggest issue is the screenplay. Probably not even the greatest actors on the planet could have turned it into quality, so I don’t blame those that appear in here, at least not those who did not contribute to the screenplay, even if of course they also could have refused the offer to act in this one. The most absurd thing, much more absurd even than then bizarre plot (or lack thereof) from this movie is that „Dicesision“ even won some minor award apparently. I don’t know if the main character from the film was under the influence as I stated earlier, but perhaps the ones who agreed on this victory were. Massive thumbs-down.