rightened and frantic, Jane (Shante DeLoach) stumbles upon and collapses into a seemingly abandoned Chevy Impala, having just fled from some unseen menace. Much to her shock, there’s another occupier already in the vehicle, materializing like a nightmarish phantasm in the backseat. “I’m not going to hurt you,” the quietly sinister man (Henry Hetz) insists, though his behavior is far from convincing. He appears to know more than he lets on.

“You could be one of them!” Making the most of a mysterious, unknowable threat, “5.7 seconds” establishes a psychological game of mistrust and danger, though it quickly escalates into physical perils. With its cramped, claustrophobic environment, the stage is set for a rather effective short subject; all sorts of horrors could await just outside the car, especially with shadowy figures brushing up against the windows and voices crying out from the surrounding darkness. It’s quite the setup for a brief series of potentially preternatural chills.

And yet, rather than using the ambiguous threats to metaphorically illustrate its episode of powerlessness and perseverance, it reveals a great deal of specific visual elements at the climax. Weirdly, it becomes even more abstruse; instead of answers, the additional details merely generate further questions. How many of these images are real? Is Jane experiencing something much deeper and more complex than the what the source of intimidation turns out to be? There’s certainly a point to this morbid fable, brimming with enigmatic interpretations of the predicaments women must oftentimes navigate, which men might be utterly oblivious towards. But pinning it down is dicey, particularly in this format of rapidity; the narrative is just quick enough and vague enough to be unsatisfying. It’s one thing to let viewers come to their own conclusions; it’s another thing entirely to give them too little to work with for them to bother with deliberation at all. In its efforts to be puzzling and emotional, it’s instead muddling and uninteresting.

– Mike Massie