The Author Review

The Author is a 2021 short film written by Joe Townsend and directed by Ben Garner.

The Author is a short film that attempts to combine film noir with the personal drama of a struggling writer, but ultimately just can not meet the lofty story ambitions it sets out to achieve.

There are so many powerful elements that were thought through here in this piece that just couldn’t come together by the end. The story beats all flow, and clearly the film takes a parallel approach between author and story, however it just can’t really find a good footing in each piece.

While a clear world is being built around the anticipation of a book release in today’s world, it is also a little hard to see where this level of news coverage would we would see for a single author. This though is a minor lodged complaint that took away from the suspension of disbelief.

The acting in the piece is serviceable but with everyone being so young here it makes things harder to get into the high stakes tension built around them. While this may be tough with smaller scale indie productions, the appearance of older actors would have really helped keep the believability of the narrative in place.

Of course, there will be no spoilers for the ending as well, but even this seems far removed from what we know of the characters to this point in the story.

As mentioned, this is an obviously thought-out piece, with a lot of effective world building going on. It only suffers from a lack of older actors and some muddy visuals that range from a bit too dark at times to overexposed in some scenes.

A film coming to life is always an achievement, and this is no different, and there is clearly a team here that will continue to grow with new productions to come.

The Author has some neat ideas and to its credit really swings for the fences with layered storytelling. The result though just doesn’t coalesce into something cohesive and what we have by the end credits just doesn’t hit as hard as the finale should.

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Cheers!

Daniel Hess

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