Catherine (Melody Reynolds) discovers the darkness within her love in writer/director Aurelia Marine's 14-minute short film Wishful Thinking, a meditating and suspenseful short film that examines obsession and lust as they are interwoven into what could so easily be interpreted as love and, in fact, often is interpreted as love.

Focusing on atmosphere rather than actual dialogue, Marine crafts a film where it's the images and the sounds and the body language that weave themselves together to represent disillusionment, temptation, and the truth of what happens with the decisions that we make.

The film's ensemble cast, including the mesmerizing Reynolds along with Alessandro De Marco and Kristel Panganiban, is uniformly strong in bringing to life images that elicit love, obsession, lust, hope, loss, despair, guilt and much more. The music from Reid Willis is atmospheric and bold, while Sharif Ibrahim's lensing is intimate and vulnerable and yet, at times, also cold and stark.

While there were a couple of transition scenes that lacked the fluidity that one would hope for in a film that possesses such meditational and poetic qualities, Wishful Thinking is a short film of lasting impact and one with images and ideas that will leave you wondering, thinking, and feeling as the closing credits roll. Wishful Thinking was only recently completed and one can only hope that it finds a home on the indie/underground film fest circuit where Marine's unique sensibilities and thought-provoking short film will get the appreciation it deserves.

© Written by Richard Propes
The Independent Critic