A Promising Start | “By Any Other Name” (2024) Short Film Review

Full disclosure: InReview was provided with a screener for the following film.

Some short films often work best as proof of concepts for a larger work than complete tales on their own. Others might work as shorter tales, but leave much to be desired excluding a handful of scenes that really work.

Daniel Deville’s “By Any Other Name,” is a little of both. The film focuses on Dianne (Jade Anouka), a middle aged Londoner who is looking for her missing sister. However, the government doesn’t have many leads other than the fact that she might have been connected to the city’s sex trade.

Meanwhile, her sister, Rose (Lauren Planner), remains just out of reach, working as a clown girl street performer in the daytime under the watchful eye of Tommy (Duncan Pow), who is presumably her kidnapper/overseer in the illegal operation. During the night, we see her attend to one of Tommy’s wealthy clients.

The entire film is built around one powerful ending scene where, by chance, Rose and Dianne cross paths. And it is done beautifully given the little context we have for her situation. The film doesn’t have much time to tell its story and it largely doesn’t — as is expected from a film that’s about 20 minutes — but we know enough to emotionally resonate with it. With that being said, it would be much more powerful in a feature where we have all those details spelled out for us — how Rose left, how she got ensnared in this awful business and what prevents her from leaving it.

There is a lot of potential here, but I cannot say this short film fully realized it, partially due to its run time and the fat in its script. Dianne’s scenes with the government worker (Avita Jay) could have been trimmed noticeably and at times the film’s dialogue feels clunky and forced.

Its penultimate scene — where Dianne unknowingly encounters Tommy — also could be polished. It does have good tension, but it should be so thick that you can cut through it with a knife; this is the man who’s been tormenting her sister for years and he is very close to being found out.

Ultimately, this film is a promising start hopefully to a much longer work. It’s hard to tell a complete story like this that encapsulates years of trauma and abuse in approximately the runtime of an episode of television.