The Call You Can’t Redo

Read Time:5 Minute, 10 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Undeletable
–

Genre: Comedy, Drama
Year Released: 2024
Runtime: 7m
Director(s): Benjamin Blaine, Christopher Blaine
Writer(s): Benjamin Blaine
Cast: Sophia Di Martino, Elizabeth Elvin
Where to Watch: shown at the Indy Shorts International Film Festival and the HollyShorts Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: UNDELETABLE is the rare short that understands how comedy and pain are often the same sound at different volumes. It traps a grieving daughter and lets every misstep, every backspace that isn’t possible, every awkward correction, reveal a life cracking in real time. In seven minutes, the film pulls off an emotional high-wire act: it’s funny because you recognize the panic of leaving a message you can’t edit. It’s devastating because the stakes are as high as they could be. That double exposure—humor laid directly over heartbreak—is the film’s engine.

The premise is simple. Emma must call a stranger—her late father’s lover—and deliver news that will reorganize two lives at once. She begins, stumbles, restarts, apologizes, tries to shape the message into something humane, and in doing so, exposes her own confusion about who her father really was. The one-take design refuses her (and us) the comfort of “delete.” There is no reset button for a life, and UNDELETABLE won’t pretend otherwise. That choice isn’t a gimmick; it’s the film’s philosophy. In what has to be one of the most powerful shorts I’ve seen, the film says more than you can imagine.

As Emma, Sophia Di Martino is extraordinary. This is an endurance test—vocally, physically, emotionally—and she never slips into performative grief or packaged pain. She paces, recalibrates, finds humor by accident, and lets guilt rush in without pleading for sympathy. The comedy arrives—awkwardness that you laugh at because you’ve mangled a message before, not because the moment is written for a punchline. Then the sorrow catches up, uninvited but inevitable. Di Martino keeps that balance with precision, making the character’s logic feel live, not rehearsed.

The writing and direction from Benjamin and Christopher Blaine are disciplined in a way that short films often aren’t. They resist the urge to add “coverage,” metaphorical or literal: no cutaways, no detours, no score telling you when to feel. The restraint pays off because it lets life do the storytelling: passing traffic, ambient noise, the unplannable world of a real street. The outside doesn’t pause for personal tragedy, and that indifference ironically creates a frame where the small details of Emma’s voice, breath, and pauses have room to matter.

Without a cut, the film accumulates tension the way a long sentence accumulates meaning; you’re hyper-aware that a single wrong word can tilt the whole thing. That’s where the comedy lives (an over-explanation, an apologetic loop), and where the tragedy is waiting (the realization that no version of this message will “fix” what’s broken). Every attempt to redo or clean up the message creates a bigger mess.

Elizabeth Elvin, as the unheard presence on the other end, functions like the film’s vanishing point. We never see her, but the performance we watch is shaped by the imagined listener—by empathy, resentment, jealousy, and a strange solidarity. Watching Emma conjure that stranger’s feelings is the movie’s quiet miracle. She is speaking to a rival and a mirror: another person who loved the same man, in a different way. The call becomes a negotiation with her own grief as much as an act of notification.

What’s left, after the final breath, is the film’s title echoing in your head. UNDELETABLE is about the message, yes, but also about the parts of life we can’t edit: the discoveries we didn’t ask for, the things we said when we were trying not to fall apart, the versions of people we loved that we’ll never meet. The film understands that the act of telling the truth is also the act of rewriting who we thought we were. Once spoken, that truth lingers—awkward, necessary, permanent. Shorts often chase something that they never catch; this one chases honesty. In doing so, it earns the gut-punch ending it refuses to underline. Seven minutes, one take, and a whole complicated life sketched in the space between apology and admission. That’s more than enough—and exactly right.

This film could be used as a guidepost for anyone looking to create a vision that will resonate with an audience. In under 10 minutes, we are given a complete story, and as the audience, we understand, calculate, and offer ourselves a resolution. Di Martino shines; her performance is what makes this story stand out. There’s an understated reality that makes it more than the moment itself.

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