Hunter Leech’s “Nonexistent”: Grief in Three Ghosts
Not a story told, but a feeling exhumed, that’s the strange spell Nonexistent casts. Less a narrative than an afterimage, it drifts through grief the way fog drifts through streetlights: shapeless, luminous, impossible to hold.
Dominique does not explain her sorrow, she inhabits it. Memory, nightmare, fantasy not chapters so much as emotional weather systems roll in and out, each altering the air she breathes. Is this healing, or just the mind rearranging pain into different shapes? The film never answers. It only asks, quietly, insistently.
Three cinematographers, three visual dialects and somehow one emotional language. One segment glows with the soft deceit of nostalgia, light wrapping around Dominique like a memory that edits out the hurt. Another fractures space with uneasy framing and looming shadows, grief rendered as geometry. The last loosens reality’s grip entirely, images slipping into the surreal, as if her subconscious has taken the camera hostage.
The performances land like quiet thunder. Without a single line, emotion travels through breath, through the way Dominique occupies space or fails to. She moves as if gravity has increased, as if the world weighs more than it used to.
Visually, the film is fearless with bold framing, patient camera work, atmosphere trusted to carry meaning where plot would usually tread. The music doesn’t command scenes; it seeps into them. Not everything is seamless, pacing occasionally overstays its welcome, and parts of the sound design feel engineered rather than lived-in. But even these imperfections feel like fingerprints, evidence of risk rather than hesitation.
Seen alongside A Woman in Trouble and The Art of Eating Sin, this short marks clear evolution, a filmmaker leaning harder into instinct, trusting image over explanation, mood over message.
When the final frame fades, resolution is nowhere in sight. Instead, a residue remains, a dream you can’t fully describe, a memory that might not be yours, a feeling that refuses to dissolve. Not closure offered, but an echo left behind.
