Balázs Turai’s Brilliantly Twisted ‘Amok’ Is A Candy-Colored Psychological Nightmare

I’m not sure how we missed this when it hit Vimeo last month, but Balázs Turai’s brilliantly twisted and award-winning short Amok is now available to watch as the latest pick from Short of the Week.

The Hungary-Romania co-production follows a badly burned man haunted by an evil garden gnome that he blames for the death of his girlfriend. During a hypnotherapy session, however, Clyde begins to confront the possibility that his tormentor may be less an external demon than a projection of his own violent impulses.

Turai packages that dark psychological premise as a profoundly twisted, mile-a-minute, genre comedy, filling the screen with highly saturated colors, pop culture references, horror imagery, and cartoony visual gags. The exaggerated, candy-colored world provides a suitably unsettling background for Clyde’s increasingly frantic and seemingly futile struggle to control himself.

Amok also features a phenomenal original score by Benjamin Efrati featuring GNOZO, which can be listened to in full on Bandcamp.

Amok was only Turai’s second short, but stands out as one of the top titles to tour the festival circuit in 2022. It won both the Cristal for Best Short Film and the France TV Award at Annecy.