After watching Cyriak's experiments in turning the everyday into something frightening and nightmarish, this comes across pretty dull and flat-footed. Mirrors the previous short, Flawed, in that it is possibly for children and about perceptions of attractiveness and the terror of cosmetic surgery. Though not only cosmetic surgery, but hospitals in general. Which draws a very fine line when crafting entertainment for children, raising some chicken/egg questions with regard to its depiction of hospitals as a terrifying and monstrous world. Like, at what point are we no longer reflecting children's views, but instead supplanting them and making them afraid of an entity that, for very many practical reasons, we should be encouraging them under all circumstances NOT to be afraid of. As a child I was never afraid of hospitals, because I never thought that I should be. In fact, I was always weirdly jealous of children who got to spend the night in a hospital for various ailments (usually tonsils being removed). To me it seemed adventurous, like when we'd go traveling and get to stay in a hotel. A new place! Had I seen this short I might've thought otherwise.
But to an adult none of the imagery is as frightening or mind-boggling as it seems to think it is. Only a pair of gloves flapping in the wind of a small desk fan, blowing empty fingers across a clacking typewriter seem like the kind of strange and imaginative imagery the entire movie seems to be trying very hard for. And even it is emphasized for so long that it ceases to be weird and becomes just another thing in the large number of things that sit there and don't do anything. There's never a feeling of tension that something bad might actually happen to the child, as everything is so outlandish and feels more like decoration than something existing in an unreal world, that it's a bit like a dull museum of oddities. Atonal soundtrack does much to increase this feeling of bored annoyance.
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