Semele (2015)

Sometimes a short film can pack an entire world into ten minutes. A single image, a gesture, a line of dialogue, and you feel the weight of something much bigger than what's on screen. Semele is not that kind of short film.

This one comes courtesy of my A-Z World Movie Tour, with Cyprus providing the entry. And look, I want to be fair. Short films are hard. You've got limited time, limited resources, and you're asking an audience to care quickly. I respect anyone who makes something and puts it out there. But watching Semele, I kept waiting for it to actually go somewhere, and it never did.

The premise is simple enough. A young girl, probably around ten years old, hitchhikes to her father's workplace to get some paperwork signed for school. That's your set-up. From there, the film uses the visit to sketch out a strained father-daughter relationship, drops a brief mention of a difficult relationship with the mother too, and then... that's more or less it. Semele disobeys her dad, gets under his feet, causes him stress, and the film ends.

I don't need a tidy resolution. I don't need everything wrapped up with a bow. Some of the best short films leave you sitting with ambiguity, with a feeling you can't quite name. But there's a difference between intentional open-endedness and a story that simply hasn't found its shape yet. This felt like the latter. A whole lot of nothing, if I'm being honest with myself.

The relationship between Semele and her father is the obvious emotional centre, but the film doesn't dig into it with any real curiosity. We're told through her behaviour that things are tense, that she's difficult, that the father is stressed. Fine. But why should I feel anything about that? What's the specific texture of their distance? What does it cost each of them? Those are the questions a film like this needs to be brave enough to ask, and Semele largely sidesteps them. The mother is mentioned, almost in passing, as another fraught relationship in this girl's life, but again it goes nowhere. It's a thread picked up and immediately dropped.

It reminds me a little of my experience with Luigi (2013), another short built around a child navigating a complicated adult world. That one at least had a specific emotional beat it was building toward. Here, I couldn't tell you what the film was actually trying to say. Is it about the loneliness of a child caught between two difficult parents? Is it about a father who doesn't know how to connect with his daughter? Maybe both, but neither thread gets enough room to breathe.

There's a version of this story that works. A ten-year-old making her own way across town to get a letter signed, that image alone suggests something about a child who's had to become self-sufficient young, a kid who can't rely on the adults around her. That's genuinely interesting. But the film doesn't seem particularly interested in it either.

At a runtime that barely registers, Semele still manages to feel like it's overstayed its welcome. That's a tough trick to pull off, but here we are. Cyprus deserved a stronger representative for the tour, and Semele deserved a story with a bit more ambition behind it. One and a half stars, and I'm being generous with the half.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 2015  | Watched: 2025-06-09

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Physical: Amazon US

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