The Ferals (2020)
When you're told a ten-minute horror short is supposedly one of the most popular films ever to come out of the Seychelles, you go in expecting something. Anything. A jolt of atmosphere, a moment of genuine dread, a creature that actually gets to do something. What I got instead was a frustrating lesson in wasted potential.
Stefan Ruiz's The Ferals sets up a genuinely cracking premise: a lone survivor of a shipwreck washes ashore on a remote island, only to realise that the locals are anything but welcoming. We're talking survival-horror with a lush, isolated backdrop and the promise of something monstrous lurking in the undergrowth. On paper, that's exactly the sort of tight, punchy concept a short film is perfectly suited to. You don't need a feature-length runtime to make your skin crawl. Some of the most effective horror I've ever seen runs under fifteen minutes. The format isn't the problem. The execution is.
Because here's what actually happens in The Ferals: a bloke walks through a jungle. Then he walks some more. Then a bit more after that. Ruiz spends the overwhelming bulk of his ten-minute runtime simply watching his protagonist trudge aimlessly through the trees, and patience, I'm afraid, is not rewarded with anything close to proportionate payoff. The "feral" threat, the whole reason you're sitting there, finally makes its move right at the very tail end of the film, arriving for what amounts to a few seconds of action before the credits roll. That's not a slow burn. That's an empty pan with a single match struck right before someone takes it off the hob.
It's a structural mess, plain and simple. A short film has to move. It can build atmosphere, absolutely, but there has to be a sense that something is accumulating beneath the surface, that the quiet has teeth. Here the quiet is just quiet. There's no mounting dread, no clever use of the island's genuinely striking surroundings to suggest menace. It's a beautiful setting, the kind that could make you feel genuinely cut off from the rest of the world, and Ruiz barely uses it. I kept thinking of how Midsommar weaponises its idyllic landscape to make everything feel wrong, how the sunshine itself becomes part of the threat. Here, the jungle is just scenery. Wallpaper.
I'll give Ruiz this much: he lands the ending. The final shot has a proper creepy quality to it, a cliffhanger that leaves you with a lingering, unsettled feeling. It genuinely works. It's the kind of closing image that makes you wish the preceding eight minutes had been anywhere near as considered. A good final ten seconds is seasoning, not a meal, and you can't retroactively build tension that was never there to begin with.
The claim that this is among the most popular films to emerge from the Seychelles is an interesting bit of context, and it speaks more to how underrepresented some national cinemas remain than it does to the quality of the film itself. I think about something like Once Upon a Time in Uganda and how it captures the sheer joyful energy of a filmmaking community working with limited resources but unlimited enthusiasm. The Ferals doesn't have that spark. It has a decent idea and very little sense of how to bring it to life.
Two stars, and honestly that's being somewhat generous on the strength of a premise that deserved far better. If Ruiz ever returns to this concept with a bit more nerve and a willingness to actually let his monsters loose, I'd be curious. But as it stands, The Ferals is a missed opportunity dressed up in tropical foliage.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2020 | Watched: 2026-07-21
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Ferals (2020) on YouTube
