Identity Unraveling in Real Time

Read Time:5 Minute, 47 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Paula Takes the Stage
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Genre: Horror, Short
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 24m
Director(s): Eric Albert Branstrom
Writer(s): Eric Albert Branstrom
Cast: Belle Eclair, Christopher Prentice, Dawn Michel Killing, Sophia Vitello, Chase Henley
Where to Watch: showing January 7, 2026, at 8 pm at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, IL (don’t miss it, one of my all-time favorite theaters!)

RAVING REVIEW: PAULA TAKES THE STAGE is a small, scrappy short that understands a very specific truth about performance: the stage is not always a sanctuary; sometimes it is a pressure cooker, sometimes it is a mirror you cannot look away from. Set inside a 1940s theater and built around a once-celebrated actress attempting to reinvent herself, the film focuses on the quiet terror of being perceived. Not just watched, but judged; not just remembered, but compared to whatever version of you the crowd decided on.

The first thing that hits is the period framing. Even without a massive budget, PAULA TAKES THE STAGE leans into the atmosphere of old theatrical spaces; the sort of rooms that hold onto cigarette smoke, perfume, and whispered rivalries long after everyone has gone home. An inspired setting for a story about identity because the theater is built on hidden identities and masks; everyone is wearing one. The talent wears one to survive. The audience wears one because it is easier to pretend they are merely entertained than to admit they came to feel superior for two hours. The film takes that reality and pushes it inward, turning the backstage environment into an emotional trap.

Belle Eclair, as Paula Page, gives the film its spine. What works best about her performance is the sense that Paula’s confidence is not absent; it is weaponized against herself. You can feel the history in her being, as if she has learned to hold a room even when she is falling apart. That tension matters because the film is not simply about a woman “going mad”; it is about the cost of living as a public-facing object. The film wants you to sit with the possibility that Paula’s unraveling is not random; it is the bill coming due. The character’s desire to step back into the spotlight is not framed as vanity; it reads more like a survival instinct. If she cannot be Paula Page onstage, then who is she when the lights are off?

Christopher Prentice, Dawn Michel Killing, Sophia Vitello, and Chase Henley round out the world in ways that help keep the short from becoming a one-person spiral. The supporting characters feel like extensions of the ecosystem: people with their own needs and resentments, their own investments in whether Paula succeeds, fails, or collapses. That social dimension is important because the film’s observations are about the relationship between an individual and the room that consumes them. The film stops being about one person’s psychology and becomes a critique of the environment that profits from her breaking point.

There is an old-school career anxiety here that calls back to backstage classics about ambition and replacement. There is also a more dreamlike sense of disorientation that fits the psychological thriller lineage the film is clearly nodding toward. PAULA TAKES THE STAGE doesn't play influence-spotting as a party trick. It uses those reference points as a foundation to explore something simpler and meaner: what if the role that made you feel alive is also the thing that hollowed you out? Horror, at its best, is often just a brutal metaphor with good timing, and the metaphor here is clean.

At times, the short is so committed to psychological tone that it risks leaving a portion of the audience slightly outside. Not because the emotions are unclear; they aren't. More because the film occasionally leans into abstraction. More clarity around the specific stakes of this return, beyond the general dread of reinvention, would make the tension hit harder for viewers who need a firmer narrative rail to hold onto. PAULA TAKES THE STAGE has a clear ambition, the tone is there, and the performances are carrying the concept. When you build horror out of psychological tension, consistency matters. The audience has to trust the world long enough to get lost in the mind.

Identity, performance, survival; those aren't lightweight ideas, and the film doesn't reduce them to a game. It treats the theater as a place where people go to be transformed, then asks what happens when transformation becomes a trap. Paula’s reinvention is not framed as inspirational; it is framed as risky. That choice gives the short its edge. It is not trying to be comforting. It's trying to be honest about how reinvention can feel like a second job you were never trained for, and how the demand to be “new” can make you despise the “old” version of yourself that got you there.

PAULA TAKES THE STAGE doesn't pretend to be bigger than it is. It uses the intimacy of the format to intensify the pressure, as if the walls are closing in with every scene. In that sense, the film understands exactly what it is: a compact psychological horror piece built on character strain, theatrical dread, and the unsettling idea that applause can sound a lot like a countdown.

The film has ambition; it has a lead performance that knows how to balance poise with panic, and it has a throughline that stays with you even when the story chooses suggestion over certainty. It is a strong example of indie short horror that aims for something more meaningful than a quick scare and delivers!

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[photo courtesy of SLITHERY-DEE FILMS]

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