A Child Caught Between Silence and Survival

Read Time:5 Minute, 22 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
218
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Genre: Drama
Year Released: 2021, 2025
Runtime: 16m 42s
Director(s): Sam Pinnelas
Writer(s): Sam Pinnelas
Cast: Billy Carlos Saleebey, Janet Carter, Matthew Tarricone, Mitchell Pratt
Where to Watch: shown at the 2025 Art is Alive Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: 218 understands that childhood isn’t shaped by what adults say; it’s shaped by everything they refuse to explain. The film makes that idea feel contained to one apartment number, where an eight-year-old boy wakes up to the same unanswered questions every morning. His mother leaves without context. Two officers sit in the living room. The silence is supposed to keep him safe, yet nothing about the situation feels safe to him. The adults may control the problem, but the audience is positioned within the reality of a child abandoned by information.

Writer/director Sam Pinnelas approaches the story with restraint. Instead of relying on suspense or tension alone, the short builds its power around absence. This isn’t a mystery in the traditional sense; it’s a meditation on isolation shaped by rules that the protagonist isn’t allowed to understand. The apartment is shot with almost clinical framing against a square 4:3 ratio, limiting the world to edges that always feel too close. That decision might seem small on paper, but it changes how the film breathes. The viewer is held in a compressed space that mirrors the emotional boundaries imposed on the child.

Billy Carlos Saleebey’s performance carries the story. He plays Colin without the intensity that child roles often encourage. Instead, he’s honest in his confusion — restless, suspicious, and intermittently numb when explanations don’t come. The film trusts him to communicate more with looks than dialogue. That trust pays off because the performance never becomes a symbolic child meant to represent “all children.” He feels like one specific kid in one contained crisis. The film's narrow focus gives it its force.

Janet Carter, playing the mother, becomes almost mythic to Colin — present in his life but absent from the story. Pinnelas uses her absence as a statement rather than a twist. We aren’t asked to judge her choices. We’re asked to see how her survival instincts translate to neglect, even when driven by love. The truth is that the film neither villainizes her nor defends her. It simply places the audience in the emotional fallout. When she leaves each day, the door's closing feels like a final scene rather than a temporary exit.

By centering the camera on the child, Pinnelas avoids dramatizing the police officers as guides. They’re not here to deliver exposition. Their small, compassionate actions barely break through the bureaucratic silence. At times, they seem uncomfortable inside the situation they are supposed to control. The film’s best angle might be its reinterpretation of authority. These officers aren’t protectors in the emotional sense. They’re placeholders representing a system that shields information instead of children. Their job is to sit, watch, and maintain a boundary without explaining why it matters—an impossible role when the audience is aligned with the kid on the other side of that boundary.

One of the most interesting creative decisions in 218 is the lack of closure. Short films often use their limited runtime to build toward a sharp twist or a dramatic reveal, but Pinnelas resists the easy ending. Instead, the film functions as a window — a slice of experience without the adult assumptions about what children don’t need.

What elevates the short is its sense of emotional memory. Pinnelas has talked about wanting to amplify his childhood recollections, and that intent gives the film a distinct viewpoint. Many stories try to imagine a child’s perspective from the outside, but 218 filters the world inward. This isn’t nostalgia or empathy from a distance. It feels like someone revisiting a moment they didn’t understand until adulthood, then turning it into a study without rewriting the feelings to make them more palatable. The stakes become personal even without explicit context.

If there’s a critique to be made, it’s that the emotion could have been deepened with one or two more moments of Colin attempting to decode the situation in specific ways. The short journey lies in its occasional retreat from the rawness it teases. A few more decisions rooted firmly in his agency — even misguided choices — might have amplified the dramatic stakes Pinnelas wanted to explore.

Even with those limitations, 218 succeeds in its central goal — showing how the adult world becomes unrecognizable when information stops at the door. The imagination of an eight-year-old is powerful, but the absence of truth turns imagination into quiet terror. The audience leaves the film thinking about the systems that operate around vulnerable children and how protection without explanation can feel indistinguishable from abandonment. 218 is quiet, measured, and carefully observed — a window into the part of childhood where adults think silence is protection. In that silence, a boy builds his own story because nobody else will give him one.

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[photo courtesy of TOO LEMON PRODUCTIONS]

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