Pandora’’s Box Short Film Review: Seeing The Future

Director: Shivam Sharma

Cast: Vaibhav Chaudhary

Some short films allow you to understand where exactly a young filmmaker stands in his journey. This isn't the same as a definitive career point; a journey is internal, and a more intimate path of evolution. It has less to do with the craft, and more to do with the kind of thinker and storyteller in the making – the type of person dealing with a mind full of philosophies and what-ifs.

These initial stages are exciting, and bring it with the limitless possibilities of creating. It isn't so much about "making a film" as it is about using the visual medium to feel like many things – like interesting characters, like emotions, like scientists, like puppeteers, and even like God.

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As a result, one sees metaphysical dimensions like time and space being evaluated more often at the beginning of an artistic journey. Even if it's at an amateur level, playing with time – and, in turn, its cyclic nature, its inherent bond with destiny, linearity and conscience – demonstrates the curiosity of a mind still in the process of self-evaluation.

Shivam Sharma shows this student-like desire in his seven-minute short, Pandora's Box. The film is about an ordinary young man who discovers a black box – a mysterious device that allows him to jump back and forth in time. The age-old question being: if you can see your own future, can you prevent it from happening? Can you alter your own fate? Is the paranoia of avoiding a predetermined fate an instrument to embrace it? More or less every science fiction 'time-travel' movie attempts to deal with the mischievous existentiality of these questions. The fun of it lies in not being able to find an answer.

Most recently, Denis Villeneuve's Arrival had a protagonist (Amy Adams) who had to first decipher and then make peace with her own doomed personal destiny – visions of her own tragic future – for the greater good of the planet. Sharma, though, concedes the depth of his subject by accommodating it in a single-location, low-budget scenario.

The space is limited, the use of an expository voiceover is perhaps ill advised, and the music and beats are indicative of a genre-oriented kind of thinking

Despite its obvious limitations, it bears the ironic fable-like familiarity of Appointment in Sammara (the ancient tale about the man trying to escape Death from a marketplace in Baghdad) and even the American Final Destination series. Such homegrown shorts are where it all begins.

One can sense the director is young, and still coming to terms with the potential of his ideas. The space is limited, the use of an expository voiceover is perhaps ill advised, and the music and beats are indicative of a genre-oriented kind of thinking. It's not about undoing these tendencies, but simply building them into a less derivative language.

This will, of course, only happen with time. One only hopes that if Sharma found a box himself, it'd lead him in the uncompromised direction of a Source Code or Interstellar instead of a Baar Baar Dekho or an Action Replayy.

Watch the film here: