A short horror film is among the Irish entries at the Ealing Film Festival this week.
Grattan Aikins’ The Test sees its protagonist, played by Laura Hutchinson, wake up in an unfamiliar, anonymous room. She is told to sit and answer the increasingly strange questions posed to her over the intercom.
The woman gets increasingly annoyed asking why she is there and what it is all about, but her questions go unanswered.
Grattan spoke to The Irish World.
Q: Tell us about screening your movie The Test at the Ealing Film Festival…
“It’s exciting. I’m very much looking forward to it. Anytime I go to a film festival, I love going to see shorts so just being able to do that for a couple days is going to be great.”
Q: What inspired you to make The Test?
“I wrote it a long time ago, maybe in 2020. I was in film school in Berlin from 2018 to 2020 and it was meant to be a film I made at the end of my time there.
“We planned to shoot it April 2020 which didn’t go ahead for very obvious reasons.
“In the meantime, I moved back to Dublin and about a year ago, I decided I wanted to make a short film to show what I can do and that I can send to festivals and The Test was the one I went back to.
“There’s a lot of intense emotions behind it which I felt very passionate about bringing to the big screen.
“It’s been a process of finding the right location, the right actors and crew and getting that all together over the last year, so there was a real gap between when the idea first came about and when it was made – it’s changed quite a lot.
“The initial idea is an AI company interrogating a human being. Obviously, a lot of discussion around AI has changed massively.
“In 2020, we didn’t have AI chatbots or ChatGPT and it was more theoretical.
“Since then, obviously it’s become a real thing in a very different form than we expected.
“I wanted to make a creative response to that about how these companies are, in many ways, running roughshod over people’s lives.”
Q: Laura Hutchinson gives a very impressive solitary performance…
“Yeah, she’s the only person on screen, it is only her face we see.
“Part of the joy in filmmaking is you have this idea of how something is going to work out and then that will change massively as other people bring their own creativity, their own brilliance to it.
“Her performance made it feel like she had taken the movie from me in a way that felt very exciting.
“I found her through a very open casting call to any film networking group I was in.
“Her name came up and I watched the stuff that she had done and thought she was incredible but even I was blown away by how much emotional intensity she was able to bring.
“We’d call ‘Action!’ and she would bring the most lived-in, intense performance I had seen in any film I had made ever.”
Q: This is not your first time to show the film in London…
“We had our premiere at FrightFest which was very exciting. There’s such an exciting energy around FrightFest.
“I love all types of horror films, and I spent a weekend seeing a wide variety of stuff but getting your own short film screened at Leicester Square is dream come true stuff.
“People watch it and they all have their different ideas of what this process meant. I had people talking to me about how they thought it was a military training exercise. Military came up a lot.
“It was really interesting to see how you have a specific idea of a movie in your head and when other people see it, they see a side of it you just didn’t even expect.
“I think there are parts of it trying to be quite subtle, restrained, and I liked that that people could interpret it in different ways.
“You want to give the audience a possibility to bring their own experience to it.
“Audiences are much smarter than we give them credit for.
“People will pick up on really, really small bits of dialogue or cuts to different shots that are meant to put an object in focus.
“Hitchcock would show a hand holding a key and that key would become the most important object. Sometimes we can feel the audience is not smart enough.
“(But) people are much smarter taking in even small bits of information and understanding it. When I’m writing or creating, I always want to remember that.
“I hope The Test does that.”
Q: The idea began before the pandemic but we see Laura’s character isolated which became life for all of us in lockdown. Did the pandemic change the film?
“I don’t think it changed much of the story itself.
“I made a lot of short films in college that are people trapped in a room somewhere because a lot of times you can’t afford a second location, you’re a broke college student and this was a completely self-funded short film.
“I wrote it with the idea of doing something that’s creative and exciting that doesn’t require me to fork out tens of thousands of euros. That leads you to specific directions.
“I’m always curious about how people react to difficult situations like being trapped in a room somewhere or being oppressed by some gigantic regime they have no control over.
“I’ve written a lot about that idea and The Test is very much about this gigantic corporation that you don’t even know what it is, which has trapped you in a specific room in complete isolation.
“It’s only one character on screen but it is a two-hander.
“She’s asked questions by an off-screen voice played by Culann who does a magnificent job.
“I wanted his character to come across as a grunt worker, someone who understands what he’s doing is emotionally devastating but is trapped by the circumstances he’s in, he’s the white collar worker implementing this regime, the buffer between what’s being done and the people making the decisions.
“That heightens the emotional intensity by having him be someone who knows what he’s doing is wrong.”
Q: Are horror films and thrillers your preferred genre in which to work?
“I’ve done quite a range of stuff which is just curiosity as well. A lot of my films have been quite uncomfortable but in different spheres, I’m now working a lot more on short horror short films.
“I like to bring emotional intensity to the audience; to knock people back in their seats and make people feel deep, complicated emotions you may not get in day to day life.
“That has led me psychological horror – but I have made romantic comedies as well.”
The Test will be shown screens at Ealing Picturehouse on Saturday 17 October as part of the Ealing Film Festival runs (15-18 October). See ealingfilmfestival.com.