“The Sniper”

Rating: 8/10

Director: Dastan Khalili

Writer: Chris Calzia

Style: Short Drama

Time: 20 minutes

Review by Mike Szymanski

Ever have a bad day at work? You know, when you bring work home with you and you can’t escape the anxiety of it.

Now, what if you were a sniper?

This brilliant metaphor of work-stress anxiety explores how all of us obsess too much with our jobs, and how that can eat away at you and your normal life.

In this case, a female sniper, who spent two decades seeing her victims through the scope of her rifle, is trying to step back into normalcy once again. It seems like impossible odds, knowing that meds haven’t helped, and her therapist even makes home visits.

Johanna Watts (recognizable from “Bullet Train” and “Star Trek: Enterprise”) plays Reagan, the tortured soul who is hearing a lone voice telling her that her sniper days are not over. She trains her gun on people walking the streets, and she creates scenarios for them, in a habit that she calls “people watching.”

Her therapist Marion is played by Eli Jane, recognizable from “The Way,” “King Kong-Skull Island” and “Mandalorian.” A practical therapist and a friend, she is willing and always to help out, but she is taking it a bit further, and even delivering groceries to an empty refrigerator at Reagan’s apartment.

Equipped with a taught tense sense of editing, great acting and foreboding music, “The Sniper” builds to an anything-can-happen crescendo. The music by Christopher Ward creates tension that is almost its own character in this short film.

Reagan doesn’t want to do anything that is ordinary. She misses the power that comes from looking through the scope of a rifle and deciding upon life or death.

Does this remind you of thinking of retiring? Sometimes, it’s as frightening as that.

The dialogue is sharp, sometimes overlapping, and clever. The editing shows poor Reagan sometimes turning into a monstrous character in a dark room.

“I have a voice in my head telling me to shoot people outside my window, explain that?” she asks her therapist. Reagan doesn’t detail the ex-military assignments she has experienced, but she does show how paralyzing her anxiety is, and how she cannot even take a walk outside her apartment.

Director Dastan Khalili was born in Tehran and directed “The Way” in 2021 and the documentary ‘the Master” in 2018.

It would be fascinating to see the before and after stories of these characters. Perhaps a feature-length plan is in the works.

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