The Emerald Wasp

“All things bright and beautiful as they say” runs contrary to both The Emerald Wasp’s sickly visual language and its sinister message, for this short film is anything but. The liturgy in the idiomatic phrase serves only as a sardonic overture to a film that repudiates such pastoral optimism in favour of a more grim natural order.

Peter Renzullo crafts a seven-minute narrative steeped in unease, where nature's most grotesque manipulations draw reflections to the darker aspects of human relationships. For a seven-minute chatty little chamber piece, one that refreshingly disregards expository information that would find the script operating outside the present conversation, The Emerald Wasp could be considered airy if not for the crushing weight its central analogy imposes.

The film opens in the same confines it finds its conclusion. A single room, one table, two people on either end. Khan (Jay Jay Jegathesan), a discernible demoniac who shares the tale of the emerald wasp and Isabella (Mirae Jang), who principally listens with an odd subservience. The Emerald Wasp marks the growing tension between the two, leveraging the chilling biology of its titular insect — a creature that subdues its prey with methodical cruelty — as both a literal and symbolic framework, reducing the abstraction inherent in themes of control, parasitism, and the fragility of autonomy down to singular universal instincts stipulated by the laws of nature. Essentially it’s eat or be eaten, you’re either in control or you’re not.

The short film’s visual language, marked by a veneer of jaundiced greens and decaying hues, forgoes any striking colour contrasting or traditional beauty, replacing it with a visual malaise that mirrors the wasp’s morbid elegance. Without the tax that depth of surroundings or colour demand, the film’s flat overlay fatigues the eyes, lulling you into a kind of semi-consciousness, solely hooked on the rhythmic cadence found in the monologue of a madman.

Renzullo isn’t worried about the calibre of acting on screen and it shows — he shoots with a suffocating intimacy bringing us face-to-face with Khan. Interestingly, it’s not until the film’s final moments that Renzullo pans the camera around for us to see Isabella, revealing what we could have guessed mere seconds in, that she’s sitting across the table from the mad philosopher against her will, tied to the chair. At this point we don’t know what’s worse: having to endure the torture she’ll inevitably succumb to or listen to her oppressor drone on about his deranged beliefs any longer.

As the incessant sounds of clock ticks propel The Emerald Wasp to its logical conclusion, we realise it is less a conventional short film and more a condensed thesis on the ubiquitous grammar felt in every intersection of life that dictates control. This is not a film that aims to shock; rather, it seeks to unsettle, to burrow under the skin and linger like the phantom sting of its namesake.