PERCEPTION | Omeleto

A family has a secret. The Connors appear to be a perfectly normal family, living a calm and prosperous life in the suburbs. The father is a doctor, the mother is a professional, and the children attend school. But underneath the tidy surface of their lives lies a current of disquiet. The Connor family has a secret that they cannot share, no matter how disruptive it is or how deeply it affects them. Directed by Erik Bloomquist and written by Robyn Babyna, this precise, cerebral short drama is both a mystery and a meditation on the discrepancy between surfaces and realities, particularly as they relate to the American family. It is a quietly controlled film, with measured, restrained pacing and a slightly distant emotional tenor. But the narrative is also a slow burn, unfurling a disturbing fuller picture and gaining in dread and momentum. Appropriate for a film about surface appearances, the storytelling functions like a series of photographs, offering individual scenes of each member of the family in their main environments outside the home. We meet them as they leave the home, and each member goes their separate ways: job, a doctor's office, school, talking with friends. Each member of the Connor family is almost studiously normal, an impression compounded by the rigorous normalcy of the even-toned visuals. The images seem ordinary, even prosaic, but they're intercut with flashes of life at home, which tease at a darker reality. The tenor of the film feels like a dark family drama, but many of the storytelling strategies are unconventional in that the conflict comes not between the pictured characters, but with the tension between public life and private realities. Each member seems well-adjusted with friends and colleagues, but at home, each retreats to their private sphere, trying to keep their collective secret at bay and manage the stress and anxiety of hiding or ignoring it. The talented ensemble cast -- actors Ryan Farrerll, Robyn Babina, James Cribbins and Alessandra Noelle Rosenfeld -- all play their roles with a subtle understatement, slowly revealing their facade of normalcy is a mask, one designed to hide a terrible secret that takes a toll on them all. It's also a burden to keep up in and of itself, and when we're left at the end of PERCEPTION with its quietly chilling final images and impressions, we're left wondering how long the family's assiduous attempts at avoiding their secret can sustain itself. Both thoughtful and thought-provoking, it achieves an eerieness, both at the family's inability to confront and acknowledge a difficult truth and how easily it is hidden in the thrum of everyday life. It conveys how even the most benign surfaces can be deceptive, and asks us to question what else we may not be seeing or sensing in the impressions and images around us. PERCEPTION. Courtesy of Robyn Babina at https://robynbabina.com.