Lyle (2014)

(Spoiler warning for major plot points and ending.) The idea of Rosemary's baby but with lesbian partners drew me in, and I was anticipating what the film had in store with its reimagining. Unfortunately, it all felt a little too vague to leave an impact. Let's acknowledge how the run time is but sixty-two minutes. To the film's credit, that's not a lot of time to establish characters, plot, setting, basically all aspects that go into the finished piece. Even so, it would have benefited from an extended run time. Even if it had to stick with a time limit, I feel as though the filmmakers could have devoted more time on what DID work to make a stronger, more cohesive story. Sticking to a short run time hasn’t stopped other media from being great. Take for instance, ‘Two Distant Strangers’. Using about half of the run time as ‘Lyle’, the short film has cohesive story beats and fleshed-out characters. Similarly, Disney’s ‘Launchpad’ shorts are roughly twenty minutes (give or take). With that time, the shorts are instantly intriguing within the first few minutes and convey strong emotion. The use of pacing in ‘Lyle’ feels inconsistent. In the beginning, it moves almost a little too slow to the point of being somewhat bland, then when things finally start to happen it moves entirely too fast to fully understand what’s going on. As I mentioned, The film could’ve honed in on specifics regarding the plot and trimmed out elements that in the film’s initial end that didn’t add up to much. For instance, I didn’t feel too invested in the relationship between Leah (Gaby Hoffmann) and June