Carlo Milillo’s intensely personal short film, Bundle, like grief itself, is claustrophobic, dark, and suffocating – a nightmare from which there appears to be no wake-up call. Bundle is screening at BFI London Film Festival.
Nothing prepares us for losing a loved one, friend, or sibling. Even if that loss is expected or anticipated, the hole it leaves isn’t. From a feeling of numbness to overwhelming emotions and loneliness, death always leaves a scar. When that loss is sudden, whether through an accident, medical emergency, suicide, or an act of violence, anger, guilt, and a need for answers become a part of the grieving process, with questions of why and how. Those questions may last months, years, or decades, and often there are no answers, leading people to learn to live with them as they slowly begin to rebuild their lives. Carlo Milillo’s Bundle explores the numbness, questions, anger and guilt of sudden loss through the medium of horror as one young man’s world collapses into a suffocating and overwhelming nightmare of no escape.
As the film opens, Will (Fionn Whitehead) lies in bed, clothes scattered around him on the floor, the bedsheets wrinkled and unwashed. He turns to his phone for company and listens to a message from his older brother, Miles (Finn Cole). From a bus on his way to a party, Miles tries to encourage Will to get out of bed, get dressed, and join him. Full of optimism and energy, it’s a call that finally spurs Will, no matter how low he feels, to get up and make the effort to go out. It’s a message rooted in the enthusiasm and hand of friendship and support only a big brother could offer, and it leads Will to leave the house that has been his prison for days.
However, when Will arrives at a dilapidated house on the outskirts of town, there’s no sign of the party his brother promised; as he enters, a maze of corridors, empty rooms, and foreboding emotions surrounds him as he desperately looks for Miles. When he finds his brother, he is entertaining a massive crowd by playing the piano, and no matter how hard Will tries to reach him, the crowd blocks his path. In truth, Will has been trying to find Miles for weeks, listening to a voicemail that is now his only link to a brother no longer there.
Taking clear inspiration from Gaspar Noé in both its visual style and its stunning choreography, Milillo’s short film beautifully and starkly captures the horror of grief and loss as the party scene descends into a mass of bodies that traps Will under their weight. Here, the suffocating nature of grief and the weight of anger, guilt, and the questions that remain unanswered are all-consuming as Will attempts to find the oxygen and strength to free himself and find peace.
With stunning cinematography from Juanjo L. Salazar, a score that merges the joys of the past with the darkness of the present, and the sublime performances of Fionn Whitehead and Finn Cole, Carlo Milillo’s intensely personal film, like grief itself, is claustrophobic, dark, and suffocating – a nightmare from which there appears to be no wake-up call. But even the darkest and longest nights are eventually broken by dawn, and as we leave Will on the phone with his mum, we can only hope that dawn is nearing for them both.
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