The appeal of film noir is widely appealing both to audiences and to filmmakers, given the number of productions that people attempt. The essential ingredients are so simple, yet so rich that the temptation to take a shot at the genre might seem an easy target. On the surface, the producers of this short film seem to have everything in place: a hard-boiled shmoe ripe for a taste of his own medicine, two sultry dames, plus more crosses and double-crosses than many feature length entries into the genre.

However, that said, the team behind this short have made some critical aesthetic errors. The film appears to take place in the 1930s or ‘40s, the golden age of the classic noir era, yet the production is oddly all over the place, caught uncomfortably between emulating the style of the older films and employing modern techniques. Rich black and white videography occasionally starts to gradually become color but without any discernable rhyme or reason. Watch The Wizard Of Oz; when Dorothy is in Kansas, the film is in black and white but when she is in Oz, the film is in color — a clear production design.

Similarly, the swaying and swooping camera movement in Siren undermines the noir flavor. Either make a film in the classic style with spare, understated cinematography that relies more on mise-en-scene than gymnastics or take a bold step and update the genre with a modern, approach but do not attempt both in the same piece.