Happy Halloween 16 days in advance!

This second horror short in our series, Widow, is one of my favorites. Steven J. Mihaljevich wrote, directed, and edited the film in Perth, Australia.

Widow is rated MA 15+ (minimum age to watch unaccompanied by an adult is 15), a classification that cautions of material “strong in impact.” Examples of this given on the Australian government’s (Department of Communications and the Arts) website are sex and drug use, neither of which figures significantly in this film. There are no sex scenes at all, and the extent of the drug use is merely the protagonist taking sleeping pills. You won’t find violence or excessive gore in Widow, either. The horror is psychological; in terms of being “strong in impact,” I can only say that yes, Widow is superb, and therefore it is harrowing. Mihaljevich left no room for dead space in its 14 minutes and 39 seconds. Every second is meaningful, resulting in a cinematic density rarely found in the horror genre. Such density is a defining aim in the making of short movies, in general, and Mihaljevich smashes it.

Without further ado, then!