A surreal short that shows clips of an unnamed assassin killing a group of individuals, we check out the short film Vigilant by Philip Brocklehurst.

For the regular readers and visitors of Screen Critix, the name Philip Brocklehurst will be a familiar one. The auteur has consistently churned out unique and unusual short films for the last few years. Whilst the stories of Brocklehurst’s films have varied, one thing that has remained is the dark subject matter, with no topic out of bounds, including murder, drug use, and suicide.
Another consistent with these short films, Philip Brocklehurst isn’t afraid to collaborate with other filmmakers from around the world, and this remains with his latest short film Vigilant. As stated by Brocklehurst himself, the project began in 2020 when under lockdown. Brocklehurst along with some other film-makers from around the world, shot their individual scenes and the director gathered them and put them all aside in order to work on other personal projects. He then, recently, figured out how to cut them all together, to make an interesting piece.
Completely dialogue-free, Vigilant shows a montage of clips. We get to see a man carefully take bullets from a dining table and place them in a gun, another man sat at a different dining table in a different location, a man torturing a woman sitting in a chair, and a second woman shot whilst she is sat behind a car, and a drug dealing peddling his wares in a dingy looking underground room. Whilst this is going on, we also hear a voice repeatedly asking the unnamed assassin to “kill them all”, kind of reminiscent of Pamela Voorhees instructing her son Jason in Friday the 13th.

The montage continues to show all of these people get their grizzly comeuppance through various shots, all including a bullet entering their bodies and heads.
Vigilant is an interesting piece. It’s by no means polished, with the shots lacking any lighting design (or lighting at all considering the amount of noise on the shots), most locations lacking any design or thought (far too many white walls) or great acting, but what it does do is make you think. Vigilant looks like it could have made it onto Mary Whitehouse’s video nasty list, had it been a feature and made in the late 70s or early 80s. It reminded me of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which is no mean feat.

Cheap but interesting, Vigilant is a decent 4-minute watch created by Philip Brocklehurst and a group of people who obviously love film and had a lot of fun creating their little segments.
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