A Drive at Dawn screened (both in person and virtually) in the Short Film Block #3 at Panic Fest, 29 Mar 2025
Writer/director Joe D’Ovidio’s A Drive at Dawn is a mystery, challenging us from the outset to work out where we are, why we are there, and which genre is driving what is happening.
As two tiny headlights emerge out of the blackness, they cast their dim light on a story that launches itself in the middle of nowhere, and in medias res. Three men (Joseph Williams, Rich Sands, Jim Piazza) are out driving in a desert that is literal, but also metaphorical given that the viewer is scanning the horizon, invisible in the dark, for any distinct narrative features by which understanding might be charted.
Whatever their purpose, it is clear that these men, in all their silent determination, mean business. They stop their pickup track in a flat, open landscape, far from anywhere, illuminated only by their pickup truck’s lights and the borrowed glow of a new moon. They get out, nervously remove a sack from the rear of their vehicle, kick the sack when it starts moving on the ground – and then, as they leave, one of them gravely tosses a child’s teddy bear besides the sack, with another obviously opposed to this gesture.
Are they gangsters dumping a body? and who is in the sack? and what is the significance of the stuffed animal? and why this barren place, at this time? The key component to any short film is economy, and A Drive at Dawn has this in spades. It is not just its brief seven-minute duration, but its story unfolding with a grim efficiency and entirely without dialogue. When the man (Eric Lampaert) emerges and sees the teddy bear which triggers in him a minimal flashback to a frightened young girl (Maggie Loy), the very specific nature of his predicament dawns, and the viewer is left to discern a grim symmetry in all these actions, and to reconstruct what has been seen in the half light and what preceded, even as this man is faced with what he has done, who he has become, and what punishment awaits.
Paradoxically, the illumination that we have sought all along will be this man’s undoing. Yet while a particular kind of horror will gradually expose itself to the rising sun, A Drive at Dawn remains, to the end, oblique in its storytelling and hardboiled as all hell.
strap: Joe D’Ovidio’s hardboiled desert-set short lets its narrative shape and genre gradually emerge from the silent darkness
© Anton Bitel
