Receiving its world premiere at SXSW 2025 as part of the festival’s Narrative Short Competition, writer-director Andy Reid’s Brief Somebodies offers an enticing premise. The film opens with twenty-something actor-filmmaker Joel (Aldrin Bundoc) reviewing self-tape submissions for an unusually personal role he is casting, an actor to play opposite him in a scene that will recreate a sexual assault based on his own life.
Joel decides upon the physically imposing Calvin (Matt O’Connor), a handsome and sensitive performer. Reid then takes us into the rehearsal room as intimacy coordinator Ria (Noor Dhanda) helps the pair come up with choreography that feels authentic and comfortable. When the two men are alone on their lunch break, a tender connection begins to form between them, one that is in sharp contrast with the dynamic between the characters they are portraying.
Suitably uncomfortable at times, Reid also finds an effective thread of dark humour that runs throughout and the close relationship that we see starting to develop between Joel and Calvin is touching. Some of the humour comes from the absurdity of the visuals as they are rehearsing the intimate scenes with an inflatable ball to separate them. Bundoc and O’Connor both deliver subtle, layered performances that draw us in, leaning into the vulnerability of the situation, and creating a clear distinction between their on and off-screen characterizations. While Dhanda brings a lived-in feel to her role and has great comic timing.
Cinematographer Colin Cameron’s autumnal palette gives the film a distinctive, natural look and his handheld camera work with slow zooms helps to establish an unsettling tone and maintain the tension. Reid cleverly blurs the lines between reality and performance, with the added layer of the sexual assault in the film-within-a-film we see being made here having been inspired by the filmmaker’s own real-life experience. It also grapples with the question of whether revisiting such traumatic events in one’s own work is “brave” or “self-absorbed”, as well as questioning how healing the process might be.
Creating a convincing film set on film can be tricky, but Reid pulls it off brilliantly here. Brief Somebodies marks Reid as a filmmaker to watch and I look forward to seeing what he does next.
Brief Somebodies receives its world premiere at SXSW 2025 in Narrative Short Program 3 on Saturday, March 8th at 6pm with an encore screening on March 11th at 11am.
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