It’s pretty astonishing how much story Francesco Calabrese is able to tell and establish in just eight minutes. “The Shift” is both a horror film and a meta-film at once, exploring a very picturesque scene draped in pure terror. “The Shift” is set in the sixties. Or at least, the neighborhood we view looks very much of its time and Betty has just decided that it’s the sixties. In either case, all is not serene when we fade in to “The Shift.” When Joe returns home from work, he is knocked out awakens to find the ginger haired beauty Betty awaiting him.
What seems like a conventional series of events involving revolting gradually becomes something so much more, and the viewer is left to decide what they’re watching. “I will never have sex with you, or cook you dinner, or clean after you again,” Betty insists, even though she demands the utmost loyalty and monotony from Joe. Director Francesco Calabrese delights in leaving the audience in the dark, relying on heavy ambiguity to convey sheer terror, without over explaining what is occurring. Surely Betty looks like your normal house wife from the sixties, but rest assured, she is anything but. Francesco Calabrese perfectly sets the picture for the ensuing horror, capturing every nook and cranny of the house Joe enters to seem as if it were ripped directly out of the sixties, right down to the black and white television blaring in front of him.
There’s never a full indication of what we’re watching, because Calabrese makes it clear that he’s running this narrative. Not to mention Betty has a firm control over her surroundings, to the point where Joe’s escape is futile. Calabrese reveals in small detail what may be occurring through very well edited peeks at Betty, but once they step out on to the neighborhood, we’re forced to examine their surroundings and view what may just be the beginning of something global. From the final scene that breaks the fourth wall, right down to the typewriter lingering on the blank page with a “The End?” Francesco Calabrese concocts a truly remarkable and spooky meta-science fiction horror hybrid that I wanted to see much more of.