Ghosts in the Fog: A Soft-Punch from Pat Pascale

What happens when grief curls into silence and silence births monsters?

Set in a lonely mountain hut where time itself seems to take a breath, Clouds follows Lena and her brother as they trudge through the thick, unmapped terrain of mourning. Their mother has died—but instead of teary monologues or convenient catharsis, we’re given silence. Tension. Glances that feel like stone. And then… something stirs. Suppressed emotions seep into the atmosphere and manifest as mystical creatures—phantoms of their psyche, perhaps, or grief given limbs and breath. Who’s to say?

Is it real? Is it metaphor? Is it memory playing dress-up? Pascale doesn’t hold your hand, and that’s part of the film’s spell. The ending vanishes into the mist—beautifully, maddeningly unresolved. Like life. Like loss.

Let’s talk performances: the actors are the true high-altitude here. Their portrayals are painfully human—raw without veering into melodrama. This is slice-of-life storytelling done right. You believe these are people who’ve lived with ghosts long before the creatures arrived.

But not all is airbrushed mountain poetry. The cinematography, though serviceable, lacks the visual daring one might crave in a film brimming with surrealism. The camera behaves more like a dutiful documentarian than a co-conspirator in the dream. Likewise, Pascale’s direction leans heavily on structure, keeping things too tethered, when the story cries out for creative chaos—room to breathe, to morph. A film with monsters born of feeling shouldn’t be afraid to feel experimental. There’s also a yearning for more world-building.

Still, what Pascale does manage is something most shorts struggle with: atmosphere. You don’t just watch this film; you sit in it. It clings to your clothes afterward, like mist after rain.

So is Clouds perfect? No. Is it a promise? Absolutely. It's a bruised, beautiful whisper from a filmmaker with something real to say—and the guts to say it differently.