​Ever been with a small group of friends who party hard using any number of selected enhancements while you remain the sober designated driver? While they are all laughing and rambling and hallucinating, you remain outside it all, unable to partake in the frivolity or even understand their communal drunkenness. There is fun to be had but that abstinent wall prevents anything from spilling over. All you can do is watch, and hope to gain pleasure from the annoyance of it all. 

 

Arabella Anderson’s short, The Trip, completely captures that exact sensation, albeit, unintentionally. 

 

Three friends - Bella Ortiz, Maddy Coghlan, Reina Hardesty - decide to trip it up with some shrooms. The drug kicks in and they laugh. They wander and ramble and smile. But then they get cold. They shiver and become afraid as their communion unleashes an ancient presence. 

 

Anderson’s short quickly gets violent and imaginative. However, by not showing the actual experience, the viewer must only rely on the most unreliable of narrators and the horror soon dilutes into an unnecessary hangover. But with broken bones.

 

Visually bright and flighty, Anderson films a good time gone bad. Yet this trip should have been terrifying.