The Fly

 Short Film Research – The Fly (2014)

This is easily my favourite of the short films I’ve studied for the coursework component of this A-Level. Easily.

The Fly follows a getaway driver as he does battle with the titular fly whilst awaiting his crews return. Hilariously, he fails to kill the fly at every turn, instead injuring himself comedically and resorting to increasingly drastic measures, culminating in him remaining unsuccessful and failing even his crew by shooting up the van they're supposed to escape in.

What I commend this film for the most is that it takes a seemingly normal situation that the audience will already have a schema for and then plays with those expectations. Most audiences would imagine a getaway driver to wait around, and then to leave when needed, but this film explores, rather comically, what happens while the driver waits. In this case, he does battle with a fly who refuses to be forcibly shuffled off this mortal coil, so to speak. It’s a relatable scenario, a fly angering you as it buzzes around but never dies, but here it is pushed to the extreme in a very James Gunn-esque manner.

Something I really want to carry over to my own film is the use of the Chekhov’s Gun mechanic, in this film being the toothpick. We see from the start that the driver has a toothpick in his mouth, so when he slaps his face to kill the fly, the toothpick goes right through his lip in a gnarly, realistic make-up effect (that I literally couldn’t mimic even if I tried). The gun is shown on the wall at the start, and it is fired by the end. In addition to the actual shotgun, of course, which is also fired by the end

The film is just wildly hilarious from start to end, and that concept of taking real, psychologically credible people and pushing their situations to the absolute limit of surrealist absurdity is something that I want to play with in my narrative. As I already mentioned, it’s a very James Gunn thing to do, and given that I’ve said time and again I would trust him to make Emoji Movie 2: Electric Boogaloo and find a way to make it incredible, if I can emulate some of his storytelling flair in my project, then I’ll be happy as can be.



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