“Above all was the sense of hearing acute.”
–Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart

Acute is a roller-coaster ride through an entirely psychical, visual and acoustic space. Its fuzzed, dreamy footage and twisting corners hint, like Edgar Allan Poe’s worm-in-the-ear story The Tell-Tale Heart, at some morbid threat that looms at the edges of perception.

Normal film-casting convention is reversed as a deaf performer, Aaron Williamson, acts as a hearing character. In fact the engine of this short film is that his character has ‘acute’ or hyper-sensitive hearing. In conventional cinematic scenes such as the thriller’s ‘cat and mouse’ chase or the horror movies’ ‘bump in the night’, actors tread carefully around corners, acting their reactions (and thus their hearing) to sounds that are usually added later to the film as overdubs. Similarly, Acute is reminiscent of a ‘fugitive’ or ‘tourist-in-distress’ film in which the protagonist appears to be hiding and running from some unheard and unseen threat in a labyrinthine and derelict Italian castle. As he runs from room to room with the camera chasing, he is trapped in an unspecified dramatic dilemma. If he stops to catch his breath he must also be silent - or be revealed. So as he stops, he holds his breath in order to be silent and listen out. But then he can’t breathe: to breathe again he must run . . .