Jason Sondhi
A quote by Benjamin Franklin is popular in management and self-help circles— “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”. Good advice, huh? Old Ben also is attributed the famous line “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. The dude was really into preparing! Filmmaker Dylan Redford is also into preparing, but the characters he plays in his films take this virtue to an illogical extreme, transforming the sheer act of “planning” into myopic and quixotic journeys of obsessive compulsion. From the “amateur content creator” who fundamentally misunderstands the pleasures of travel in his previously-featured short, My Trip to Miami, to this film, Emergency Action Plan, where he plays an office worker drone who takes his boss’ suggestion about preparing for a catastrophe a bit too seriously, Redford is adept at taking surface-level absurdity and spinning it into over-arching satire that condemns far-ranging trends and institutions.
In Emergency Action Plan, Redford takes on media sensationalism, corporate ass-covering, YouTube radicalization, and America’s gun culture that serves as fuel for all these feedback loops. The film is interestingly structured as a thriller for the social media age, a mixture of Homeland and vlogging, as Redford stars as a version of himself who relentlessly documents his descent into paranoia as he goes deeper and deeper into preparing for the possibility of an active shooter showing up at his workplace. Redford’s previous film, My Trip to Miami, was one of my favorites of 2018, I called it a “…self-consciously sloppy, diy piece, one that takes on farcical dimensions, yet is, in its small way, a masterpiece”, and Emergency Action Plan shares a lot of the same DNA—it is richly metatextual, via the semi-autobiographical nature of the story and Redford’s presence as the main character, and similarly mixes in direct-to-camera monologues and found footage.
The emotional core of the short is a staged reenactment of when the central character had to play a key role in a school preparedness drill.
Emergency Action Plan is much more ambitious and polished though. Inspired by an art installation Redford did in 2015 at the University of Minnesota, the centerpiece of the exhibit was a performance piece of him doing “Run, Hide, Fight drills” in an office “set” (the footage of this exists in the film as the office sequences). Taking inspiration from this, the emotional core of the film is a really pretty staged reenactment of a formative experience in the character’s life, a time when, as a kid, he was tapped to play “dead” in a school preparedness drill. Earthquakes were the culprit at that time, but the inclusion of these sequences provide context and emotional ballast to the present-day plot. These sequences also break up the film visually, providing a welcome dose of color and production quality to the film’s otherwise chintzy Go-Pro and screen-life sequences. They also befit the thriller aspect that Redford goes for, allowing him to play with temporality in complicated ways. There are 3 separate timelines to the film, and the interplay of them allows Redford to construct a twist ending that is genuinely surprising and narratively satisfying.
Active shooter plots have become one of the most overused tropes in Short Film over the past couple of years, and while we have featured some, we’ve passed on a dozen others. The issue with most is their uncomplicated presentation of the trauma, simply reinscribing the fact of their existence through dramatization, but not really contributing to the discourse around them meaningfully. Redford is able to approach the topic from a novel angle however—while not in any way excusing the sad reality of mass shootings, he satirizes the deleterious effects on individuals who over-index on the threat level. In doing so he incriminates a media ecosystem that inculcates fear, and copy-cat institutional cultures that sustain it. These mass frenzies, in turn, inspire conspiratorial thinking and lead susceptible people down internet-rabbit holes where these ideas are reinforced. The film is about a man who is radicalized by the act of preparing for these tragedies, but the dark joke of the film is how the mechanics of his radicalization are indistinguishable from those of their perpetrators. It’s tricky, loaded territory, but whether you judge it a success or not, it is interesting, and a promising evolution of Redford’s meta-filmmaking style which takes cues from the work of Nathan Fielder and John Wilson.
Following a successful festival run which included stops at Fantastic Fest, Maryland Film Festival, and Palm Springs Short Fest, we’re pleased to welcome Redford back and host his online premiere. The filmmaker tells us that he is currently writing a feature loosely based on this short, and, in the meantime, if you want to learn more about his work and unique voice, click the link to his website below.