Dear Mum

A young boy tries to do something for his mum, but everything that he tries ends in disaster.

Dear Mum opens with a young boy getting out of bed with his ugly little scratchy-haired dog companion sticking by his side. Mum is already downstairs working from home on her laptop, with her headphones on and microphone wrapped around her head, unable to offer her son the time and attention that he seems to need.

First of all, he tries to grab the pen that his mum has been using, only for her to pull it back off him and tell him, ‘No’. Then he goes out to the garden to get something off one of the bushes, trailing mud back in behind him all over the floor, and then finally he’s into one of the top cupboards where he spills pasta all over the place after reaching too far. All the while his little four-legged friend watches him going to-and-fro, unable to understand, much like us, just what on earth is going on during this fateful morning.

At just over a minute-and-a-half long, Dear Mum is trying to tell its story and send its message in a very short space of time. There’s no dialogue to hear of in the short, and Mum’s ‘No’ is only mouthed for us to see while a whiny indie tune repeating the same four words, ‘You Are The Reason’, is played over the top of the images. There are no credits to the film and there’s no real indication as to what the whole thing was for in the first place.

Obviously, everything comes good in the end, and the mother figures out what the boy was up to all along, as they hug and share their love for each other. This gives the short film the feeling of an advertisement, with its extremely short runtime and overbearing song playing into this stylising of the video, offering us nothing other than a schmalzy single window into an otherwise unknown set of circumstances.

Seemingly aiming for something like the John Lewis Christmas adverts, Dear Mum tells its story and wraps things up within the space of a song, trying to give us all the feels without hinting at anything else in the outside world. Unfortunately, the dizzy heights of John Lewis are never reached, and even though we’re basically expecting some company or product name to be emblazoned across the screen at the end of the film, we’re left with a banal aphorism and a lack of understanding about what it was all for.

Dear Mum ends up not being a real film, but an advert for something that isn’t even made clear. It doesn’t have the emotional level of some of the adverts that we see on telly every day, and when it can’t even reach that level, we understand that it’s just a clichéd situation, repeated a million times before, designed to tug at the heart-strings and pull on our base emotions. Really this is a marketing production, which in fairness is well filmed and produced, but which lacks a product or a message. Yes, we should all love and appreciate our mothers, but do we really need an advert to tell us that?

Pointless.