FILM REVIEW: Jackplot

Director Marco De Luca won the Dekkoo Love and Distance Film competition and as a result was funded to produce another short movie.

The result – the 11-minute long Jackplot is not for the faint-hearted. Two newlyweds, Kevin and Jay  ( Jack Parr & Adam Redmore ) are driving home having won what looks like a phenomenal amount of cash at the racetrack.

De Luca’s skill, using Hannah Hooton’s terse and tense dialogue, is to make the claustrophobic interior of their car at night on the motorway a place of foreboding.

We’re not long into the plot before the car interior is intercut with scenes of a badly injured man – difficult at that stage to tell who – with gruesomely bloody injuries .

Back in the car, the men argue about how the windfall is to be spent, one wanting a honeymoon, the other with hair-brained schemes, and all the time the money sits in an open bag menacingly taunting them. The air of tension builds and builds with false alarms and a deepening gloom.

When the inevitable accident happens, there’s a sad and scary resolution inside the car  that brings you up short .

As I repeatedly say, short films usually show promise of something bigger – difficult to see how this storyline could extend but there’s no doubt that De Luca is an atmospheric director of award-winning talent.

Jackplot is released on multiple platforms on December 2.