A woman begs her estranged brother to help her kill the person who murdered her husband in the fast-paced short thriller The Protégé.
“Revenge is a dangerous motive” was a line from a 1980s action film, and it rings true in most movies that revolve around the theme of getting payback on those who did the protagonist wrong. The revenge trope has been seen in the film world for the longest time, and yet it is still a successful base for a plot.
Coming in at a little over six minutes in length, Louis Findlay’s short film The Protégé feels like the start of something much bigger. A prologue to a feature maybe.
The short begins with some clips of a young couple in love, filmed with the use of the female’s mobile phone. They look happy as they vacation around Europe. The film then suddenly shifts to an English pub as the female of the couple, Sophie (Sarah Crofts) sits alone looking solemn. She is then joined by Sean (writer/director Louis Findlay) – her brother whom she hasn’t seen in a decade.
Sophie then tells Sean that she wants to hire him to kill Ashraf -the man who murdered her husband. He states that he has heard of the man but refuses the request until the distraught Sophie shouts that she will kill Ashraf herself.
Sean then offers to train Sarah in the ways of an assassin, and we are transported to a montage of training scenes as Sarah undergoes a transformation, whilst Sean’s voice is heard in a voice-over, kind of reminiscent of Bruce Wayne being trained by Ra’s Al Ghul in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, minus all the ninja stuff. Will Sarah take up the offer, or will she back down under Sean’s advice? Like Nolan, Findlay leaves the ending rather ambiguous, and it works well.
As stated above, The Protégé feels like it is just the start of something much larger in scale, but it works well. It moves along at a great pace, and the cinematography courtesy of Zak Fenning is very nice. There are a couple of audio issues in the pub scenes, where it feels like it hasn’t been mixed great, but that can be forgiven as everything else is done so well.
If this is just a taster of what’s to come regarding The Protégé and Louis Findlay, then colour us intrigued. We would definitely be interested in watching an extended version within this world that Findlay has created.
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