Bobby

Directed by Cameron Summers, Bobby is a tender story of loss and family centred on a ghostly protagonist. While the film manages to stir some heartfelt emotion in a minimalist package, there’s a tangible feeling of discomfort in the film’s central thesis that doesn’t appear as intentional, veering dangerously close to justifying suicide.

Bobby is the short’s protagonist, and it’s quickly revealed that his story takes place after his tragic suicide. He speaks to the audience matter of factly, in a soft voice performed adequately by Luke Pierce Powell. Physically, so to speak, Bobby appears as an archetypical ghost: white sheet, black eyes; it’s reminiscent of the costuming in David Lowery’s ‘A Ghost Story’. Bobby expounds on his life story, describing how his parents died when he was young, leaving him with a (g)host of happy memories on holidays, but also regret that he didn’t know them better. His quest in the afterlife is to reconnect with his mum and dad, and he sets off into the world to find them.

The film is shot well, and there are some really great visuals in here. The film leans into cold blues in its colour grade, and the scenes of Bobby roaming the earth look appropriately melancholic. There’s a particularly haunting scene where Bobby looks into a house’s kitchen through a window, and in watching these strangers living their lives happily and ordinarily, there’s a real tangible sense of distance between the subjects in the frame. Besides some audio hiccups and some out of place murky shots later in the film, Bobby appears to be a well constructed short.

As alluded to earlier, the film unfortunately treads a rather awkward line around the subject of suicide, and possibly makes a case for it as a way to reconnect with lost loved ones. An early shot in the film shows Bobby’s method, a hanging noose, which comes across as insensitive and morbid. Suicide is already a difficult topic for many people, and showing on screen the image of a noose, as well as Bobby’s suicide note, is jarring. The audience can intuit the details without being shown the artifacts, and it ends up almost trivialising Bobby’s pain and hurt; in this moment, his life is distilled into its bleak end for maybe a little shock value or grim intrigue at best. The same can be said for the film’s denouement, where Bobby finds peace and all that he was looking for with his parents in the afterlife. I’m not arguing that the film needed to veer into a didactic ‘life is worth living’ narrative, but I do wonder what Summers is expressing in Bobby’s suicide effectively being the solution to his problems in life.

Bobby’s resolution left me cold. It’s difficult to look past the themes that the film explores, which is a shame because the short is a well made and largely sensitive portrayal of grief. Unfortunately, I found Bobby to be too heavy handed and awkward with regards to its protagonist; there’s little sense of an internal world in him, and his entire character is reduced to the last heartbreaking decision in his tragically short life.