Starring Lizzie Aaryn-Stanton, Philip D. McQuillan, Eloise Thomas and Tilly Vosburgh

Directed by Daniel Purse

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Susie (Eloise Thomas) is a quiet young woman who lives at home with her mum (Tilly Vosburgh). Their lives are peaceful and calm and never quite relaxed. When Red Miss (Lizzie Aaryn-Stanton) comes home we discover why. Eloise wants to be her. Mum is terrified of her. And Red Miss has secrets of her own.

I love short movies for the same reason I love short stories. They’re fiction distilled, an espresso shot of idea and performance. If you don’t like one, it’s over before you know it. If you do, it stays with you. Red Miss will stay with you.

Zia Holloway’s script doesn’t put a foot wrong, and trusts us in the exact way no one in the house trusts each other. That trust is constantly upended too as we go from assuming this is an abusive family, to the strange power dynamic when Red Miss returns and the terrifying, offhanded way we discover what she’s doing. Vosburgh has the hardest job here, and she lands the biggest scare of the movie, moving something terrible into the house the same way she’d take laundry in from a daughter back from University.

Thomas’ Susie is, like Mum, normality curdled. She’s a deeply relatable and familiar teenage girl who idolizes her older sister and clashes with her mum but also presents as fundamentally nice. Susie’s a good kid who doesn’t want to be a good kid and the way the movie explores her relationship with the other women in the house over ten minutes is really impressive both in its subtlety and its darkness. Suzie wants to be Red Miss, and won’t be told she can’t, or the price of that.

Aaryn-Stanton’s Red Miss is the core of the film and played with one part regal authority and one part just plain terror. Aaryn-Stanton has remarkable presence and sweeps in like a monarch. But as the movie unfolds we learn the only certainty of her is that her hands are profoundly bloody. Read one way she’s a hallucination, read another she’s a demon. Read any way you care to she’s as terrified of her impact on Susie as Susie is in awe of her. A toxic triple co-dependency of a relationship, tea and biscuits, scalpels and Tupperware filled with something awful. A suburban nightmare whose ambiguity is as delightful as it is chilling and ten minutes you won’t soon forget.

Verdict: Red Miss is inventive, deceptively simple and a superb piece of horror. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart