Horse Brothers

By: Kelly Kearney

Landing at SXSW is art house director Milos Mitrovic and Fabian Velasco’s midnight horror-comedy short Horse Brothers. The film, which loosely touches on topics like family loyalty, consumerism and our obsessions with technology, fills the twelve minutes of screentime with disturbing images of ambiguity that plays more to the experimental parts of filmmaking than any plot-driven vehicle film fans might be used to.

Told through the eyes of Anton the horse, Horse Brothers is a story about two brothers and one murderously influential horse. One brother, Frodo a/k/a Junior (Sam Singer), spends his days trying to sell broken tablets and mobile phones to keep his pot smoking stay-at-home brother (Milos Mitrovic) and their creepy horse in drugs and animal feed. When Frodo returns from a day of work with a handful of batteries that he traded for two of the devices, his brother accuses him of pinching from the profits and his favorite horse’s meals. The same horse who spends his time whispering suspicions and murderous influence into Frodo’s angry brother’s ear. “Never go against the family,” he ominously says, as the one brother threatens Frodo for coming home empty handed. This warning sets the brothers up or a climactic and surreal dreamscape that finds Frodo’s brother awakened by a traumatic moment that hasn’t been seen in film since The Godfather. But don’t worry, a horse’s head in a bed doesn’t interfere with Anton’s ultimate plan, which we see play out on a deadly boat ride that leaves you laughing up until the credits roll.

Whether or not Anton is the trotting embodiment of technology’s evil grip on our own ability to communicate with each other and evolve as a species or if this was all just one angry brother’s horrible drug-induced dream, the most mind buzzing moment of the film is when we see Frodo holding a knife and neighing like a horse as iPads rain down from the sky with Anton screensavers. The imagery suggests there is a war waging between technology and the natural order. Death isn’t even permanent inside this pixelated world. You can electrocute your brother and decapitate a horse, but nothing is forever in this matrix. A horse is not just a horse but a symbol of how easily influenced mankind is by what we see on our screens, or this is just a strange little snippet of family warfare done in a bizarrely comedic way. It’s tough to say what Mitrovic and Velasco were going for with this piece; the bones of it are difficult to dig out.

Adding to the confusion and unease was the jerky camera style and harsh overexposed film that forced this viewer to painfully squint through each outdoor scene. It’s uncomfortable, but maybe it’s supposed to be? Nothing about Horse Brothers is on the nose or easily defined storytelling; like all art, it is subjective and left up to the viewer to determine what it means and how it speaks to them. With its dream-like hazy filters and red popping nightmarish world, Mitrovic and Velasco excel at marrying the grit and grime of Grindhouse to the often campy and stomach-churning terror we expect from a midnight film showing. In the end, Anton and the two manipulated brothers is a story about obsession, addiction to technology and that felling of greed that claws its way into every pore of life on earth. It is all the things that make the modern-day human tick, but it is also a warning about how we can become easily distracted by our obsessions and how quickly they can separate and turn us against one another over something as ludicrous as a taking horse. Human interactions are necessary for a society to sustain some sort of status quo; anything short of that and we all could wind up becoming the victim of fratricide by farm animal.

If you’re a fan of symbolic art house films that also dip into the darker side of life, than the short Horse Brothers is worth a view. However, prepare yourselves for this headscratcher as you might just find yourself thinking about it for days afterwards.