Bundle (2026)
There is a particular pleasure in stumbling on a film almost nobody has seen yet and finding it is the real thing. Carlo Milillo's Bundle has barely registered anywhere so far, and that feels like an oversight, because this is a genuinely accomplished short: an aggressive, symbolic and deeply felt portrait of grief that packs more into thirteen minutes than a lot of films manage in ninety.
The setup is deceptively simple. Will heads to a party to meet his brother, but something is not right, and before long the evening curdles and his whole world starts to collapse around him. What unfolds is less a plot than a descent, a man caught in a cycle of grief after the loss of his brother, replaying and unravelling in ways that grow steadily more nightmarish. It is the sort of film that trusts you to feel your way through it rather than having everything spelled out, and it is all the stronger for that.
Technically it is a real achievement. The visual effects are fantastic for a short of this scale, used not as showy decoration but to externalise Will's spiralling state of mind, and they are matched by editing that is sharp, propulsive and genuinely unsettling. The craft never feels like it is straining for effect; everything is bent towards the emotional reality of grief, the way loss distorts time and place and self. For a piece working on what cannot have been a large budget, the control on display is seriously impressive.
It also carries real weight because you can feel the sincerity behind it. The film is, as I understand it, dedicated to a real person, and that knowledge gives its symbolism a grounding it might otherwise have lacked, so that the aggression and the strangeness read as genuine expressions of mourning rather than style for its own sake. It is raw without being self-indulgent, which is a hard balance to strike.
Three and a half stars. Bundle is a confident, inventive and quietly devastating short that announces Milillo as a film-maker with a real eye and something to say. My only reservation is that its very intensity means it occasionally risks overwhelming the feeling at its centre, but that is a small price for a film this ambitious. It deserves far more eyes than it has found so far, and if you get the chance to see it, take it.
Bundle screens at the BFI London Film Festival as part of the Altered States shorts programme.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country United Kingdom: The Driver (1978), Interstellar (2014), The Dark Knight (2008)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More drama: Macbeth in Compton (2026), Something Pointless (2026), Home (2026)
