Tension Built on Words

Read Time:5 Minute, 45 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
With Arms Raised
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Genre: Drama, Thriller, Short
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 11m
Director(s): Jon Cvack
Writer(s): Jon Cvack
Cast: Jonathen Wallace, Andrew Garrett
Where to Watch: available to watch now, here: www.vimeo.com

RAVING REVIEW: How much discomfort do we tolerate in everyday interactions before acknowledging that something is actually wrong? That uneasy question is the core powering WITH ARMS RAISED, a short that understands something basic about fear; it doesn’t always equal a jump or a scream. Sometimes it shows up as forced friendliness, awkward laughter, and a driver who keeps choosing to “smooth things over” because that feels safer than honesty.

The setup is simple on paper: a rideshare pickup; a passenger in the back; a driver up front; the kind of experience everyone recognizes. But the film’s intelligence comes from how it weaponizes that script. You can feel the driver trying to be decent and professional, trying to read the temperature while keeping his own nerves invisible. The passenger, meanwhile, talks like a person who’s already rehearsed these thoughts a hundred times; he’s not just venting, he’s testing the waters. He tosses out conversational bait, waits to see what gets affirmed, then escalates. The effect is suffocating in the best way, because it mirrors a real dynamic most people don’t like admitting exists: the moment you realize “being polite” might be the very thing that traps you.

Jonathen Wallace carries the film with a performance that’s all small decisions. He’s not playing a hero, and he’s not playing a fool; he’s playing a guy doing what a lot of people would do when cornered by a stranger’s volatility. There’s a constant calculation behind his eyes, and the film gets power from that internal truth. You can sense him weighing empathy against self-preservation, weighing when to push back versus when to let something slide. That tension makes him deeper, because he isn’t performing righteousness; he’s trying to get through the ride without making the situation worse.

Andrew Garrett’s work is like a tightrope, and he walks it with precision. The passenger can’t just be “crazy” or “evil,” because that would let the audience off the hook. Instead, the film frames him as someone spiraling; someone carrying grievances that feel half-personal and half-absorbed from the loudest corners of public life. Garrett lets the character swing between menace and something that resembles loneliness, and that’s what makes the backseat feel dangerous. The performance doesn’t ask you to forgive him; it asks you to recognize the shape of a person who wants to be heard while also wanting to be feared.

A huge strength here is how the film uses conversation as action. The passenger keeps tightening the subject matter, turning “common ground” into a trap. The driver’s responses start to matter in a way that feels uncomfortably familiar; you can hear the difference between agreeing, appeasing, and genuinely believing something, and the film plays with how easy it is for those lines to blur under pressure. That’s where WITH ARMS RAISED becomes more than an exercise in tension; it becomes a snapshot of how people get pulled into complicity, one awkward “yeah, totally” at a time.

The shorts’ visuals support that design. The close framing creates a boxed-in intimacy that suits the story, and the black-and-white presentation gives the ride a bleak clarity, like the film has stripped away distractions to leave nothing but faces, reactions, and intent. The aesthetic choice also fits the project’s production reality, which is part of its charm; this is a film that knows its limitations and turns them to its advantage. The staging and control are strong enough that it rarely feels like a compromise, even when you can sense the setup's contained nature. (My only minor grip, the removal of the headrest for better sightlines, soooo many films and shows do this, but it catches me every time!)

Once the passenger’s energy tips past “unsettling” into “alarming,” a lot of viewers will start guessing the destination. The short mostly survives that because the moment-to-moment tension stays blunt, but there are moments where you can feel the film leaning on inevitability rather than surprising you with a sharper left turn. The passenger’s rhetorical path can occasionally feel a little too curated, like the character is hitting several pressure points in a neat line.

Where the film really lands is in the emotional aftertaste. It isn’t just “tense”; it’s unsettling because it implicates the audience in the driver’s strategy. You understand why he tries to keep things calm, even when “calm” starts resembling surrender. You also appreciate the driver’s temptation to search for a connection, because the alternative is admitting he might be trapped with someone who’s already decided what the end of this ride is supposed to mean.

WITH ARMS RAISED works because it treats tension as a social phenomenon, not just a cliche moment in filmmaking. It understands that fear can be disguised as “just talking,” and it captures the specific dread of realizing that the wrong nod, the wrong laugh, or the wrong attempt at kindness might be interpreted as approval. When a short can leave you replaying your own instincts in similar situations, it’s doing something more than just adding suspense.

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