... in which contemporary cinema turns out to be underrated, and an unknown animator creates animation in red tones.
A group of young people walked down a dark, narrow corridor covered with burgundy carpeting and entered a small, stuffy hall through tightly curtained doors.
— Invitations?— asked the chubby guy with curly hair, resembling a puffed-up dandelion, who immediately seemed unpleasant to Kirill.
— Yes, please,— he took out his smartphone from the pocket of his narrow plaid trousers and opened an image with a QR code on the screen. The chubby man scanned it with his mobile phone's camera with evident pleasure and, smiling with a sweaty face, replied:
— Go ahead, take your seats.
The hall was already half full. In front of the screen, slightly raised on a low podium, office chairs with shiny legs were arranged in four rows. The screening had not yet begun, so in the warm air, which the cheap air conditioner struggled to cool, quiet conversations and the smell of coffee could be heard. A typical atmosphere of an intimate cinema hall attached to a book club, where the local intellectual community gathered in search of cultural entertainment.
"Let's go to Seryozha's place after the movie," suggested Olya, settling into a chair between Kirill and Nastya. "We'll try some real mulled wine and play board games."
— Alright then,— the young man nodded, thoughtfully scratching his neatly trimmed beard at the barbershop.
Satisfied with the answer, the girl glanced briefly at her friend and, adjusting a strand of hair that had fallen out of her asymmetrical bob, crossed her legs. Today she was definitely pleased with herself. Black, slightly flared trousers with creases perfectly matched the black sleeveless blouse with a shirt collar, and the strict white tie tied underneath created a somewhat eclectic look—a liberated unisex-style girl combined with a 1930s vampish woman.
Having once again surveyed the hall, she became convinced that today she visually stood out stronger than all these tedious, unkempt people who didn't pay attention to themselves, and shifted her tired gaze to the screen. The assembled audience, although consisting mainly of regular patrons of bookstores, did indeed appear quite diverse. In the first row, a mature couple modestly occupied seats at the edge: a woman in a strict dress and a large balding man in a lilac shirt. A couple of empty seats away sat two girlfriends—classic office workers pretending to be Instagram fashionistas with plumped-up lips, who just wouldn't stop talking. Nearby, separated by several unremarkable people, a tall guy stretched his legs across the aisle; he had long, curly hair and looked like either a designer-programmer or a gay biker. Olya simply didn't have time to notice and assess the other audience members, because the lights finally went out and the screen showed intro sequences with opening credits.
The girl was rather skeptical about the author's festival cinema, though she didn't show it. At least Kirill liked such eccentricity, and the sly bitch Nastya, at the first opportunity, supported this interest with her pretentious ramblings about hidden meanings, subtle authorial intentions, and interesting directorial decisions.
The first short film about a suicidal couple in love who died on the eve of their wedding apparently wasn't understood by the audience or was perceived as a comedy, because both silly office colleagues and someone from the back row giggled throughout the entire movie at the characters' lines. The second story, about a man pathologically obsessed with hand-washing, turned out to be more understandable for the audience. But having learned from experience at festival screenings, Olya knew that the first films are always just warm-ups, and the real horror begins closer to the middle. And so it happened this time as well.
as an ordinary romantic story about, of another short filmturnedto the fact that a white guy lost an argument to a black girl, and now she,wearing a strap-on,forces her young a blowjob in the presence of his. the audience was replaced by whispers.Chatty plump-lipped girls from the front row,exchanging remarks, began to get ready to leave. An adult couple, oddly enough, watched the movie with restrained , they had probably seen more than this in their long lives.Flashing her rounded thick-rimmed, the bitchy Nasty a began to Kirill's ear something about "of a modern tolerant society tenaciously captured film."Meanwhile, a new movie has started on the screen about a couple of psychopathic criminals who committed , dressed up in life-size costumes of a catand a bear cub. Olya frowned a little, remembering that just fifteen before of the session, they saw the same man ina fox cub costume in the park, wholay down righton the bench. The girl then suggested that he might have felt sick, but his friends joked that" the animal was justtoo drunk ortiredatwork," and hurried to the cinema. A sudden crash behind her madeher look awayfrom the and from her . In the firstseconds, Olya couldn't even believe her eyes. Aman in a suitfrom a park bench stood in the doorway.His whole see medtenseas a spring, the white synthetic furon his chest was stained with blood,and a heavy copperrack was clutched in his shaggy paw.One of the ones usedin the lobby to tape off the cafe area from of the bookstore space. At the feet costumed fox was a plump "" with a fractured head. body, cub moved into the hall.
— Unexpectedly! Kirill said calmly.— The organizers did not mention that there would be a thematic performance besides films.
— Oh, it's on trend now, — Nastya did not fail to insert her "five kopecks".— The film kind of steps into the audience, destroying the fourth wall, and, breaking the boundaries between genres, creates the effect of total immersion.
However, in the next moment, the young people completely lost the desire to conduct art criticism conversations, because the newcomer plunged his improvised bat into the balding man's head with a flourish. Blood and pieces of brain sprayed towards the pomaded girls, followed by heart-rending screams. The man with the split skull slid to the floor, and with a second sharp blow, the fox cub sent his companion to him.
The audience jumped up from their seats, but did not dare to rush to the exit, because the killer confidently blocked their way. One of the girls, still screaming, began filming what was happening on her phone, as if the camera and everything on the screen could somehow protect her from the nightmare that was happening in reality. Meanwhile, the fox cub, without meeting proper resistance, knocked out a couple more people with a swing. This time, the blows fell obliquely, pressing the fractured temporal bones inside the head. The second one was not accurate, but it was so strong that it tore off a piece of the poor guy's hair along with the skin, partially scalped him and exposed the whitish skull.
Wanting to defend himself with a chair as a shield, a tall, long-haired guy tried to knock the attacker down, but immediately received a blow to the knee with a metal baton and fell into the darkness of the hall with a groan. Pushing the chair aside with his foot, the little fox finished off the prone man with a couple of punches, and confidently stepped towards the remaining spectators.
— Kirill! Well, do something! Nastya shouted nervously, but the confused guy just stared in a daze at the slowly advancing synthetic beast. Having gathered her thoughts, Olya, not expecting such determination from herself, suddenly grabbed the bloody baton of the attacker with both hands and hung on to it with all her weight.
— Grab him together! She had just managed to shout out when she was immediately thrown aside by some superhuman force.
The fox cub unhurriedly picked up the brass rack with two paws, as if trying on how it would be more convenient for him, and suddenly drove it straight into the chest of Kirill, who was standing against the wall. The shiny ball-head almost completely entered his body, breaking and pressing several ribs inside at once. Wheezing, the guy slid down the wall.
Pushing each other and stumbling over overturned chairs, the audience finally rushed to the exit. Someone fell and was stepped on, someone was already very close to the safety door, but the killer did not intend to let anyone go. Methodically stabbing at the backs of fleeing people, he continued to break spines and skulls.
When Olya opened her eyes, she realized that she could not control and almost could not feel her left arm, which she seemed to have broken in the fall. Writhing in pain, the girl still found a long gilded pen in her purse - her pride is a pretty high—quality replica of the real "Parker". She carefully got to her feet and through the semi-darkness of the cinema she saw a furry figure looming over Nastya. She cowered in fright in a corner by the stage, directly under the screen, on which a bearded Scandinavian was fiercely hitting a hefty fish with a bat. One swing of the copper club, which had already turned truly blood-red, and the opponent's head turned into a shapeless mess.
In impotent despair, Olya made one last lunge and stuck the fountain pen right into the center of the red withers. She had no more strength left for anything, and she lost her balance and fell backwards directly onto the screen. The flashing of the projector blinded the girl for a moment. The sounds around them seemed to have subsided. Only the music on the end credits came from somewhere far away. "That's it... Is that really it?" thought Olya. Instead of an answer, a healthy shaggy head with sewn-on plastic eyes and a bloody smiling muzzle appeared against the background of the fading projector. The fox cub clutched a gleaming gold Parker in its paw. That faint gleam in the semi—darkness was the last thing the girl saw and remembered, because a second later the fountain pen abruptly entered her eye sockets several times.