by Liz Wiest, Staff Writer

Fresh off the Angelika Film Center Dallas’s festival lineup is the enigmatic Baby Blue, the second short from emerging NYC filmmaker Luke Gigante. The film follows the tentative soon-to-be mother Mary–hauntingly played by (Hannah Deale) as she heads back home with her unassuming but charming boyfriend John (Charlie Howard) for a gender reveal party, only to be met with shuddering, bloody results.

Baby Blue undoubtedly hits all the marks of a short that was produced like a well-oiled machine. The production design by Elise Schatz cultivates an eerie and foreboding atmosphere, and when accompanied by the haunting score from NYC indie musician Molly Murphy and the sound design of Trevor Misplay, the puzzle pieces from every department just fit perfectly together like a tableau of the dark underbelly of American suburbia.

Through the subtlest of expressions, Deale successfully delivers a nuanced performance in less than ten minutes, a tough feat for horror shorts that normally depict flat, "final girl”-type stock characters. Gigante’s strategic use of tight shots on her add to her oppressive loss of privacy, reminiscent of the themes in Rosemary’s Baby. Like a modern Mia Farrow or even Jessica Harper in Suspiria, Mary’s dual function as both protagonist and plot device keeps the focus tight with an unnerving background buzz. Despite the vagueness of the story, the script manages to maintain captivating, high stakes that ultimately do make the ending feel like it pays off. As a horror aficionado, I’m usually irked by conspicuous endings I can’t trace a throughline to, but the mystery lingering after the shocking twist at the end I personally feel is reflective of the discourse around motherhood and pregnancy, a topic that similarly does not offer a one-size-fits-all answer.

Gigante is best known for his last short, an equally compelling thriller of similar themes, mother_mary, which screened to positive critical reception at the Hudson Valley Film Festival. As these two pieces continue to gain more traction, as far as the local NYC scene is concerned, I predict a wave of consistent great things to come from the director and his team.

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