Bump in the Night (2026)
Bump in the Night, Brianna Lee's short film, is a tidy little slice of domestic dread that builds its tension beautifully before stumbling slightly at the final hurdle. The last of her Halloween Nights shorts I worked through, it is effectively creepy for most of its length, and a nice showcase for how much unease she can wring from the ordinary. Three stars.
It opens in a car, with Lee's character and her partner, a returning face for anyone who has seen her earlier film The Camper, heading off on their first trip away as a couple. They settle in, they resolve to make a habit of these weekends, they sleep. And then, in the night, there is a bump. It wakes her, but not him. It keeps happening. He insists he hears nothing.
That is all I will give away, because the fun is in the mounting paranoia. Lee is good at making the familiar feel wrong, and the film's strongest stretch is a genuinely skin-crawling piece of slow-burn misdirection, the soundtrack ratcheting up the suspense as a simple domestic detail starts to curdle into something far more sinister. For a good while it has you properly on edge.
My one real reservation, and I will stay vague, is the ending. After such a well-constructed build, it stops rather abruptly and leaves more hanging than I would have liked, the kind of finish that feels like it runs out of road just as it should be landing its biggest blow. A touch more resolution would have elevated the whole thing.
Three stars. Bump in the Night is a well-made, nicely acted and properly tense domestic thriller with a cracking central idea, let down chiefly by an ending that does not quite deliver on the excellent groundwork laid before it. The craft is clearly there, and I only wish it had trusted itself to land the finish.
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