With Bent: Volume Two, Mindscape Pictures offers the second in a trilogy of short anthologies. Much like Bent: Volume One, director Jason Santo delivers a variety of short offerings in varying styles and approaches and, surprisingly, is a similar experience to watching their first Bent entry. Let’s take a look at each short individually:

The Dinner (Four and a half stars): Like with Bent: Volume One, Santo’s first offering in Volume Two is the best of the bunch. The Dinner, starring Christopher Soroka, Paul Sarkis, Jennifer Irizarry and the stunning Tina Krause, is a tremendous achievement. Shot with a black and white glow harkening back to a 1940’s romance, The Dinner is beautifully shot. Also impressive is that the short is without any dialogue. Like the highly successful Marisa on Volume One, The Dinner is a directorial cinematic feast.

The story, about two couples that get together for a dinner, weaves nicely and changes directions very effectively. Sexual tension fills the air as you are lead to believe that potential affairs are in progress, only to discover that something deeper is unfolding. To give away much more would ruin the story, but Santo expertly leads you down a couple of potentially important paths, only to redirect you toward something more fulfilling. And Krause radiates on screen. She is truly a stunning leading lady with a natural beauty and a sultry, yet innocent presence. I hope to see her in more of Mindscape Pictures future projects.

Another nod should go to the composer Anni Brunson. Filling a 17-minute dialogue-free piece is no easy task, but Brunson achieves tremendous success with incredible effectiveness. Every note, every theme supports and accentuates the action on the screen… excellent work.

In the Interview with Santo about The Dinner, he states that he wrote this during a very creative time in his career, at the same time he penned Marisa. Santo, a very skilled screenwriter, can be a tremendously visual director when he’s forced to no longer rely on the crux of dialogue. Pieces like The Dinner show us just how talented Santo can be behind the camera when forced to turn words into images. A great piece of microcinema.

Time Heals All Wounds (Three stars): The story is about a man who’s spent two years desperately fighting the loss of his true love. The short stars Roman Berman as Mike, the distraught loner, and Alecia Batson as Ellen, his long-time friend. Ellen grows weary of Mike’s constant state of depression and pushes him to move on with his life. Mike, in a moment of clarity, wishes time would stop until he came to terms with his loss, so no more time in his life would be wasted in vain. And he gets his wish.

The story by Santo is excellent, akin to an old time Twilight Zone episode. It’s crisp and tight and multi-layered; one of his best offerings. I would go into more detail if I could, but it is so effective in its simplicity that to do so would ruin the joy of discovering the story for yourself. And, like The Dinner, a nod should go to composer Luke Stark for adding an appropriate creepiness to the short.

Unfortunately, Berman and Batson’s performances undermine the potential lying on the pages of the script. One of my acting teachers in college once said that, as a piano has 88 keys, for every acting performance to be fully realized it should touch all 88 keys. Beginning actors, however, often have one-note performances, playing an emotion instead of a character having an emotion, and that is the sense that both Berman and Batson gave to me. They were distraught or depressed or sad or angry, but not real people actually feeling those emotions. In microcinema, getting great actors is tough, but the performance in this project kept distracting me from the intricate story being revealed to me.

All that being said, seeing this tight story unfold with its twists and turns is a real treat to watch and, in the end, is a very worthy project.

In a Sky with No Angels (Two stars): This short confused me. I don’t mean that to say I didn’t understand the story being shown; I just didn’t understand what type of story was supposed to be told. The plot revolves around Sarah Grey, played by Kathy Nestor, and Paul Denborough, played by Jason Santo, who are old high school acquaintances brought together under suspicious circumstances. Paul calls Sarah out of the blue, some ten years or so after high school. Not particularly close in high school, Sarah is reluctant to meet Paul, but does so out of curiosity and loneliness. After an awkward dinner, Sarah meets up with Paul in a hotel room where he tells an intriguing tale, very reminiscent of the film Brainstorm.

And then, the story seems to change gears. It turns into a police matter, which was interesting, but that storyline ends rather abruptly, and then it turns into a love story, of which I had a hard time believing would come to fruition in a single night.

In great contrast to Santo’s tightly scripted yarn Time Heals All Wounds, In a Sky with No Angels seems overly wordy and without a clear direction. Either these are two of the most sad, lonely and pathetic people that come together in moments of desperation, or it’s the most complex pickup strategy I’ve seen, where a manipulative liar tells fanciful tales that strain believability in order to woo the heart of an overly vulnerable woman. Or both. Or neither. Any one of those stories would be effective, but I didn’t quite know which one I was watching.

As with Bent: Volume One, this trilogy ends with the weakest of the shorts. After watching the cinematic language on display in The Dinner, and seeing the well-written language displayed in Time Heals All Wounds, I found In a Sky with No Angels a disappointing end to an otherwise excellent DVD.

This DVD is professionally packaged, top to bottom. From the covers to the moving menus to the format to the presentation…great work. I long for the time Santo combines the visuals of Marisa or The Dinner with a tightly effective screenplay like Time Heals All Wounds or Haunted. At that time we’d finally see Santo in full force; something that would be a great treat to behold.



Bent: Volume Two is, overall, another fine achievement by the hardworking blokes at Mindscape Pictures. As they continue to grow in talent, experience and as storytellers, one can only imagine what they will offer us in the future.

Three and a half stars.