Echo - Dealing with grief

ECHO from Lewis Arnold on Vimeo.
Lewis Arnold's Echo is initially a representation of teenagers as moody, isolated and morally corrupted, however after scratching the surface this short gains much more complexity and depth as the character of Caroline forces herself to relive a painful moment in her life.


The cyclical narrative structure contains three main phone calls in which the audience learn more about Caroline each time, her initially being an innocent pedestrian in great distress as an awful event has occurred. The audience enjoy the subversive twist when we discover Caroline is exploiting helpful civilians for money, the camerawork switching from an objective, distant perspective to a subjective, involved one to allow us to understand Caroline's actions. Caroline returns home and isolates herself from her family, refusing to help her brother with his homework as she is 'busy,' the audience seeing that there is something off about the did-functionality of this particular family.


During the second phone call, we see Caroline's little brother bump into her in Nottingham as she tricks a passer-by. He watches for a moment, then goes up to her slowly, confused. The audience discover more about the narrative at the moment when he says; "how does he know about dad?" Suddenly, the story becomes much more interesting for the audience as they wonder if the façade Caroline subjects herself to is partially real or all fake. Following this, is one of the scenes i think is most important, as we see Caroline in the garage with her brother, as he tries to get out his bike to leave. As she helps him get the bike free, a wide shot reveals to us that not only are there three bikes in the left of the frame, but also one unused bike in the right, presumably their father's. Also in this scene, is the moment when Caroline tells her brother that his tyre is flat, but he leaves anyway. This will become important later on.

During the third and final phone call, close-up, slow-mo shots are used to show Caroline's impressive performance, which suddenly becomes all too real, and the audience start to realise that she must be subjective herself to some sort of emotional torment each time she does this. The cheap exploitation of people for money interestingly becomes what appears to be a form of self harm as Caroline forces herself to relive the emotions she went through when her father was in an accident. As well as this, it could be argued that the film is ended with an ambiguous finale, as Caroline's slightly too convincing performance makes us wonder if something has actually happened, as her younger brother went out cycling with a flat tyre.

The de-saturated, grim aesthetic of the film lends itself towards a social realist piece, along side a lack of music and presence of ambient sound creating a naturalistic or realistic feel for the film. Not only this, but the short also feels, in a way, a coming-of-age story, as Caroline deals with her grief in a strange and different way, learn how to deal with the loss of a loved one. Ultimately, this is what defines her character, her actions and her relationship with her family.



In terms of how this short will effect my own short film, I thoroughly enjoyed the format of the cyclical narrative and building an in depth character study around it. What is great about this idea is that it is fundamentally quite basic, but instantly has so much depth to it as soon as you start to dissect it with questions like 'why is she really doing what she's doing?' Therefore, I think that although I am not very intrigued by the social-realist format, I find the cyclical narrative and character study format very appealing for creating an interesting short film.