What If? (2023)

Not every film can make a shopping mall feel both magical and menacing, but Forbidden Fruits challenges that.

This is a Spanish-speaking short film that contains English subtitles. The short film is produced in the United States.

These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.

The most impressive aspect of this film is the honest and natural performances given by the on-screen duo.

Remakes. Reboots. Reinventions. Redundancy. It's the common practice in Hollywood of late, sometimes offering us victorious reimagining of what can be considered cinematic classics while also, more often, falling flat on their UN-imaginative faces in utter defeat and lackluster results. Admittedly, with this in mind, I went into the newest incarnation of "The War of the Roses" with typical trepidation and cautious optimism.

Mona Fastvold’s nineteenth century lesbian romance is emotionally charged, restrained, and poetic without feeling forced.