A woman receives a message from her husband saying he will be home late from work. With the house to herself, she decides to just let loose in the short film While The Cat’s Away…
We get to watch and review many films here at Screen Critix, and one of the most enjoyable moments for us is when we watch a short or feature which turns out to be completely different from what we were expecting. We got that with Aaron Carroll’s latest 10-minute short film While The Cat’s Away… Just when we thought we knew where the story was going, Carroll pulls the rug from under our feet and sends us spiraling into another direction.
Tidying up around the house, Sarah receives a text message from her husband that states he has to stay back at work and that he will be home late. The woman (played by Cariad Wallace) is remarkably fine with the news and decides to use up the free time by playing around without a care in the world.
Dressed in a shirt, tights, and briefs, she dances around the house like a crazier version of Tom Cruise’s character in Risky Business. We see a montage of her re-enacting scenes from Grease (playing both Travolta’s and Newton-John’s characters), she pretends she’s Jabba the Hutt, she builds a fort out of cushions, and she walks along the dining room floor on all fours, laughing to herself as she does so.
She then finds a home-made “Honeymoon” tape and, just as things start to get frisky on the television set and with herself and her wandering hand, she is interrupted by the pizza delivery guy. We next see her slobbering down the tomato and cheese savory treat, causing a mess to her clothes and face.
But what looks like a silly “letting-your-hair-down” sort of day, takes a sinister and surprising sharp turn. I can honestly say I wasn’t expecting the last couple of minutes of While The Cat’s Away…, but it has certainly left an impression.
With, what is basically a short with one character (baring the last minute), While The Cat’s Away… is excellently performed by Cariad Wallace. Resembling Minnie Driver, Wallace has excellent screen presence and comedy timing. I found myself laughing at her facial expressions and the sheer daftness of her performance throughout the ten-minute run-time. She is certainly an actress I will be looking out for in the future.
The audio of the short is very well done, the first couple of minutes plays out like a music video and is crisp. I was also very impressed with the cinematography courtesy of Cameron Zayec, who also worked with Aaron Carroll on the short called Harvey, which we also reviewed. The use of lighting is professional throughout the short, and the use of colours for the scene where the woman is dancing around the house goes really well with the actions and the song; pinks and blues used with lens flares to make it really pop out.
As aforementioned, we reviewed Harvey by Aaron Carroll in the past and gave the short a hefty four out of five stars. He has done even better with this piece. If he carries on creating films that can interest, entertain and shock the viewer, there is no doubt he will be moving onto much bigger projects.
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