The Ferals (2020)
Short films occupy a peculiar corner of the film world. With no commercial distributor to answer to and often no budget worth speaking of, a short is theoretically the purest expression of a filmmaker's instincts: you have a handful of minutes, a single idea, and nowhere to hide. The horror short, in particular, lives or dies by how efficiently it can manufacture dread, and some of the genre's most memorable work has come in compact form. The Seychelles, for its part, is not a country with a well-established film industry, which makes any locally produced fiction feature or short something of a notable event in itself. Shot in 2020 by British-based filmmaker Stefan Ruiz, The Ferals arrived with a premise that sits comfortably in familiar survival-horror territory: a young man, having survived a shark attack, washes up on a remote island only to find that whatever is waiting for him in the treeline is considerably more dangerous than the open water he has just escaped. It is the sort of setup that horror fans will recognise from everything between classic castaway nightmares and more recent isolated-threat pictures like Midsommar, though the ten-minute runtime means Ruiz is working on an altogether different scale.
Puzzle Piece Productions is the outfit behind the film, a small independent concern rather than any studio with significant resources behind it, and The Ferals appears to have been made on the kind of budget where every decision counts twice. Ruiz pulls triple duty as director, lead actor, and presumably a good deal else besides, which is an admirable piece of ambition in itself. The Seychelles location is, on paper, a genuine asset: pristine jungle, dramatic coastline, and an inherent sense of isolation that a soundstage could never convincingly replicate. For horror purposes, lush and genuinely remote locations can do a great deal of the atmospheric heavy lifting without a single frame of effects work, as anyone who has watched the creeping unease of a well-shot exterior will tell you. The short format, meanwhile, has its own set of conventions. At ten minutes, there is precious little room for a slow burn; economy of storytelling is not a stylistic choice so much as a structural necessity. Whether The Ferals makes good use of what the location and the brevity of the format offer it is, of course, exactly what Macca gets into below. For a point of comparison on how low-budget genre filmmaking can punch well above its weight, his thoughts on The Silence are worth a read, and for a broader sense of how short-form and documentary work can sustain atmosphere without conventional narrative, there is always his piece on Once Upon a Time in Uganda.
As performer, Ruiz carries the film entirely on his own shoulders for the bulk of its runtime, which is a significant ask. The "feral locals" of the title function less as fully realised characters and more as a threat lurking at the film's edges, so the success of the central performance is about physical presence and reaction rather than any conventional acting dynamic. It is a polished but unremarkable approach on paper, the kind of one-person survival scenario that leans heavily on location and concept to fill the gaps.
When you’re told a ten-minute horror short is supposedly one of the most popular films to ever come out of the Seychelles, you’d expect something remotely thrilling.
Stefan Ruiz’s 2020 picture The Ferals sets up a genuinely cracking premise: a lone survivor of a shipwreck washes ashore, only to realise he’s being hunted by the island’s terrifying, feral locals. It’s a classic survival-horror setup that should have had me gripping the edge of my seat, especially with such a lush, isolated backdrop to play with. But instead of a tense, atmospheric nightmare, I found myself watching a rather tedious exercise in patience.
The biggest issue here is the sheer, frustrating waste of its own runtime. At a brisk ten minutes, a short film needs to get straight to the meat of its story, but Ruiz spends the vast majority of the clock just watching his protagonist trudge aimlessly through the jungle. You’re essentially watching a guy walk through some trees for what feels like an eternity, waiting for the promised monster to actually show up. When the "feral" threat finally makes its move, it’s relegated to literally just a few seconds of action right at the tail end of the film. It’s a bit of a mess structurally, completely robbing the picture of any real build-up or dread.
The film manages to stick a somewhat decent landing. It wraps things up with a nice little cliffhanger that at least leaves you with a lingering sense of unease, proving Ruiz knows how to frame a final, creepy shot. But a good final ten seconds doesn't magically erase the preceding eight minutes of absolute nothingness. You can’t build a genuine horror experience on the promise of a payoff that you only get to see for a fraction of a moment.
The Ferals is a deeply frustrating misfire that squanders a brilliant setting and a highly promising concept. Stefan Ruiz had all the right ingredients for a punchy, terrifying short, but the execution is just far too sluggish and empty to recommend. It’s simply too short to develop any real substance, and for the vast majority of its runtime, it’s just not good. It’s a missed opportunity.
The Ferals is the sort of film that is genuinely interesting to think about in the abstract, even if the experience of watching it proves less rewarding than the idea suggests. It raises real questions about what a short horror film actually needs to deliver on its promises, and about whether a striking setting and a solid concept are enough to carry ten minutes without tighter structural discipline. Ruiz clearly has an eye for a final image, and the ambition involved in making anything at all in the Seychelles on a shoestring is not to be dismissed. But ambition and execution are different things entirely, and as any horror fan will tell you, the scariest thing a short film can do is waste your time. For a filmmaker still finding his feet, there are lessons here worth learning. The island, at least, looks great.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2020 | Watched: 2026-07-21
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Ferals (2020) on YouTube
