If you’re going to attempt to kill people by burying them alive, make sure to bury them deep. And really, you can never bury your victim deep enough, so maybe keep a shovel in the trunk of your car? In the short film Pedestrian, there doesn’t appear to be a “deep enough” for the protagonist’s conscience. Tanya Vasquez-Bodden plays an anonymous driver who has had one too many “cocktails” before hitting the road, and most like a couple on the road as well. After she hits a young woman (Ricki-Lynn Berkoski), she panics and chooses to bury her in the woods to conceal her crime. However, as she attempts to shove dirt over the young woman’s unconscious body, the woman wakes up, begging for help. She ignores her second chance at calling 911, however, and physically suffocates the woman into unconsciousness.
Back at her car, however, the driver learns that she perhaps didn’t bury the woman deep enough. As she sits in the driver’s seat, a dirty arm wraps around her neck, strangling her. After escaping from the car, she runs back to the shallow grave and digs up the remnants of the figure she left behind, who appears to be still ambulatory and out for revenge.
The film’s successes stem from its genuinely creepy premise, sophisticated effects, and rather refreshing ending. Vasquez-Bodden effectively embodies a woman who is both horrible selfish and wracked with guilt. She tearfully and profusely apologizes, even as straddles the semi-conscious girl and cruelly smothers her, and is quite convincing as someone who is so self-interested that murder seems an appropriate response to evade jail time. While the film doesn’t ask us to sympathize with this callous murderer, it does humanize her. In addition, the film’s effects display a subtly unusual in a student film. The effects convey eeriness without overdoing current trends in horror. But the film’s charm really comes through at the end, when the third character (Roger Greco) arrives to give a rather unexpected ending.
However, the main character’s last words of the film, “What do you want?” end up echoed in the minds of the viewers. The film has a hard time with the victim’s motivations and desires, which leaves a void at the end of the film. Does she want revenge? To be a murderer herself? Whether legitimate, unthinkable, or schlocky, short horror films usually have some sort of ethical or moral quandary in their stories. Pedestrian leaves us without a moral point, and maybe without even a practical one.