Rob Munday

From its opening 60-seconds, Flock announces itself as a film operating on its own terms. As archival footage of sheep plays beneath an eerie, tension-building score, an atmosphere is established that feels at once familiar and deeply unsettling. 90-seconds later, an extraordinary long take captures the unexplained disappearance of an entire flock and director Mac Nixon has made his intentions clear. This is filmmaking that knows the power of withholding information, allowing an image to linger just long enough for the ordinary to become uncanny. By the time the film settles into its story, Nixon has already delivered one of the most striking cinematic set-ups you’re likely to encounter in a short (or perhaps even a feature) this year.

Funded by the BFI and Film4 through their Future Takes scheme, which supports innovative and ambitious filmmaking, Flock certainly lives up to that brief. Nixon has described it as a “blockbuster short film” and the ambition is evident in its carefully orchestrated set pieces, brought to life with impressive practical effects and a confident command of cinematic scale. Yet what makes the film so effective is not simply its technical prowess, but the way that spectacle serves the story. Set in a Welsh community thrown into turmoil when its livestock mysteriously vanish, Flock uses its surreal premise to explore the complexities and concerns of a place whose identity is bound to the land. Shot in black and white, the film possesses a striking aesthetic that feels integral to its world rather than just a stylistic, showy flourish. The result is something akin to a dark folktale: timeless in its imagery, unsettling in its storytelling and rooted in the particularities of Welsh life.

Like the most enduring folktales, however, Flock is doing more than spinning an intriguing yarn. Beneath its supernatural mystery lies a subtle exploration of how Welsh people and communities are represented on screen. As Nixon explains, the film began with stories of “how Chernobyl and irradiated weather affected Welsh sheep populations”, but gradually developed into something more concerned with “how a community reacts when their livelihoods are taken away from them”. However, in creating his short, the filmmaker was also motivated by what he sees as a persistent tendency to depict the Welsh as “simple people with simple problems who all come together in a crisis and go home happy”. Wanting to offer a “more realistic and gritty representation”, with Flock Nixon resists the comforting resolutions that such portrayals often promise. The result is a film that delivers the scale and spectacle of a miniature blockbuster while using genre elements to challenge the stories we tell about the people and places we think we know.