When it comes to short film concepts, director Gillian Wallace Horvat doesn’t f*** around. First she served up a WTF satire about a branding intern who gets f***** up the a** with a bottle of high-end whiskey and gets pregnant. And now we present, in all its glory, Kiss Kiss Fingerbang – the romantic tale of a young woman who will do anything when “fingerbanged” by her partner and it’s with this revelation the hilarity begins.

“We all want to get off and fall in love”

Despite the absurdity of the short (and things do get pretty ridiculous!), the premise of Kiss Kiss Fingerbang is actually based around the somewhat sweet notion of how we can all lose control when we’re falling in love. “I think we’ve all been there”, says Horvat, “on both sides, and have seen how love is used to rationalize manipulative behavior. Anton’s character’s actions are actually present in every romantic relationship. The film just takes them to a grotesque level to point out the absurdity of what we say and do to one another to gratify our desires. In fact, I see myself equally in both characters and I think a lot of people do to, though they might not want to admit it. We do bad things when we think we can get away with it, and we get bad things done to us when our idealized vision of our partner obscures reality. Because we all want to get off and fall in love”.

When writing these articles for Short of the Week, I always tend to look for a personal angle in a film, rather than getting into some complex analysis you’ll need a thesaurus to translate. And with Kiss Kiss Fingerbang, although I’ve never had the exact same experience as our protagonists, it does capture that dizzying feeling of falling in lust perfectly. We all get a little crazy when a strong physical attraction to someone takes hold, and things can quickly get out of hand. Capturing just how insanely intense that feeling can be is no easy task – but for me Horvat nailed it (or should that be ‘fingerbanged’ it?).

Now with a feature in development, which she describes as “much more offensive” than Kiss Kiss Fingerbang, Horvat looks to have become somewhat of an expert in attention-grabbing narratives and here at Short of the Week, we’re excited to see how her approach to filmmaking converts to the longer format.