“The Film That Manifested The Genre”
Grudge was not a film made to demonstrate a theory; it was the unintentional event that gave rise to the Auntrolye genre itself.
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Grudge represents the first cinematic manifestation of the Auntrolye framework, not through inspiration, but by structural discovery. Every frame made in Grudge serves the purpose of telling the story of the character. The film is built entirely from the antagonist’s perspective, allowing us to see how a distorted mind affects the world around them. The antagonist, who is emotionally fractured and obsessed with revenge, highlights the significance and drive one obtains when their core values and ideas are challenged, and in turn, how the world changes. Viewers do not observe his psychology from the outside. Viewers live in that exact psychology. The film traps the audience into a world that is a 1-to-1 replica of the antagonist's mind: the exact principles of Auntrolye.
Where conventional psychological thrillers portray unstable characters within stable environments, Grudge explains how Auntrolye is different. Auntrolye makes it clear that the environment itself is unstable because the character is emotionally unstable. Time collapses in Grudge, locations change without transition, and monologue is imagined by the character to be dialogue. In Grudge I even used a technique rarely used, mainly to show how the antagonists' experience is a fabrication of their mind. This technique is voice-overing everything. I intentionally chose to re-record voices in an audio studio with the actors to make it feel fabricated and have this fake feeling. This fake feeling is an example to how the antagonist feels the entire film: unable to believe how someone could have caused him so much harm yet have no remorse. This is exactly the kind of creativity Auntrolye demands. I am not saying for people to start making every line a voice-over, but what I am saying is to experiment with techniques that best incorporate the feelings of the character into the film world itself.
Tension in Grudge doesn’t arise from some classical external threat or moral dilemmas. It comes from the fact that the antagonist we follow throughout the story has an unstable set of principles that constantly collide with any other principles shown by any other character. Here, the antagonist is not in control of their own emotional regulation, trying to mask the rage they feel and eventually release, keeping their composure. To them, it is impossible to comprehend how someone could just get away with something so morally vicious in their opinion, making them feel disgust throughout the interaction. It perfectly explains how the character pretends to help, to be there for his worst enemy, just to trick him into believing that he was his friend all along. The antagonist was aware of what he was doing, and there didn’t seem to be any remorse whatsoever. What mattered most was trapping their believed-to-be worst enemy in a situation where death was inevitable.
Reflecting back on my work, I can confidently say that the short film did not break any Auntrolye rules; rather, those principles and laws were fully obeyed. There’s more to come from me, and I won’t stop making films, but before I can go back to it, I believe I must share Auntrolye with the world. For a film genre’s first film, I think Grudge did very well. Is there room for improvement? Of course there is. Grudge has completed its intended purpose, which is to show Auntrolye as a full film genre, which it did.