While I really like what “Ruby and the Dragon” seems to be setting out to do, I was never quite sure what director Phillip Jordan Brooks was hinting toward with his resolution. This makes “Ruby and the Dragon” a bit foggy in its intent, and what it’s all supposed to mean. “Ruby and the Dragon” is a short film about a young girl named Ruby who lives in a fantasy world. And why wouldn’t she? Her life is just one miserable event after the other.
By the time we’ve met her, she’s halfway insane, and we can never be sure why she seems to content. It’s implied her father might be physically abusing her, but there’s not a lot of reason why she’s hiding it or protecting him. Ruby spends her days creating shadow plays for her young sister, but when her father’s slip causes a horrible tragedy in the family, Ruby has to decide how far she’s willing to go to keep them together.
“Ruby and the Dragon” is a series of really depressing, brutally sad incidents that occur in the life of Ruby, as she struggles to keep some semblance of family in her life. The performances by the cast are terrific, especially from Phillip Jordan Brooks and Leah Catherine Thompson. There’s a real desperation in her role as Ruby, and you sense that anxiety when her father grows catatonic, causing her to scramble to keep the world around her from crumbling. Ending on a very down note, I was never too sure why it ended the way it did.
Did Ruby know something that everyone else didn’t? Was she so firmly believing in an after life where everything was cozy that she never paid much thought to reality? Is this just the tale of two very insane people? “Ruby and the Dragon” has beautiful direction, with a great sense of storytelling prowess, the narrative in the end just fogs it all up. I was left pondering why certain characters acted as they did, and I could never really find an interesting conclusion I could settle on. Thus it feels somewhat incomplete when the credits have rolled.