Here’s our review of Emily Dhue’s short film Bill, which screened as part of HollyShorts Film Festival in London.
Emily Dhue’s Bill finds an oppressed woman preparing the perfect steak dinner for her husband. Unfortunately though, her husband is a bit of an arsehole, to put it mildly, stopping her from seasoning her food while piling on the salt on his and suggesting all the various lifts and tucks his wife could get to meet her “potential”. How lovely.
Well, this particular dinner is the last straw that breaks the camel’s back and the wife finds herself murdering her husband in a fit of rage. The problem is, now she has no husband but she’s clearly a problem-solver, turning him into a puppet she can control and love.
Read more: Short film reviews | My Week With Maisy, Clodagh and Corpse Fishing
The idea behind Bill is funny and horrifying in equal measure. Dhue crafts a highly stylised short that is certainly pretty to look at and Bill is laugh-out-loud funny but the themes behind the film aren’t quite clear. The wife has no name, no dialogue, no voice, but killing her husband doesn’t give her any voice or autonomy either. Instead, she’s still attached to him, much more literally now that he’s dead. Ultimately, Bill works better as a horror-comedy than a meaningful exploration of rage and feminine liberation.
The script has been penned by Deana Taheri who also plays the wife. Taheri’s performance here is committed and extreme in the best possible way. Because there’s no dialogue for her to prioritise, everything in her performance is exaggerated, which works well for the comedic elements. There’s a great premise here and Bill could have easily been longer with more fleshed out themes. Bill mostly leans into the comedy of it all, encouraging us to laugh at the situation despite the horror of it, and only features three actors in total, making this a very contained short, but the viewer leaves with a sense that there was more to mine here.
