A girl (Ángeles Páez) is humming, with one eye concealed by an unorthodox medical dressing. There’s a static overlay. It’s night in the woods, one that appears curiously warm. The girl stumbles upon a tiled room (à la slender man, the 8 pages) and marvels at her reflection in several dusty mirrors. She does this repetitively.
We then watch her view her naked body under a magnifying glass in another scene, spliced together in the sequence. The score gets louder. Finally we see the girl is also trying to read a book, aloud. She is struggling, as though she does not know or remember how to talk. Eventually the film culminates and concludes as she manages three words ‘the bitter truth’.
This sequence lasts a total of 6 minutes and what I first noticed is that the score here is phenomenal. Staticky and creepy. It reminds me so much of the OST’s I love from RPG-maker horror games (I don’t think these reminders were intended and are manifestations of my own interests).
The title Non Ad Locum the Latin for ‘At this passage’. ‘Non’ suggesting this is not the place (evil talking heads be like).
It seems like this title references both the tiled underpass/bathroom the girl discovers and also the page she is attempting to read. A short surreal horror short—or just an odd little snapshot?
I like how weird and ambiguous this is, what is there to interpret? I genuinely don’t know. With a little digging into Amanda Lago’s PR company’s Instagram, I can see this film is actually not a horror at all but a reflection on a liminal space. It is an exploration of several spiritual concepts. Therefore ‘Passage’ here is transitory rather than some of the other interpretations I had made.
The film is all in all a really cool watch and I loved its aesthetic quality. It’s really unique and macabre, but there are strange signifiers of calm. Like the pinks and blues of the sunset, the warmth of the lighting, the girl’s joy at being able to read, the strange nostalgic sounds in the score and the various sounds of wild nightlife (bugs in the woods not the club scene). I think it was really creative and I would love to learn more about the intentions behind it considering there is no real narrative. A short, liminal and creatively dark short. Worth the watch.
