Film Reviews | Filmmaking

Hidden Gem: The House at the Edge of the Galaxy

1 Aug , 2013  

Written by Dave Walker | Posted by:

In this sci-fi short, a young boy is visited by a travel-weary cosmonaut and awakens to the magic waiting to be discovered in an old, abandoned house.

Every film festival has its hidden gems, films whose originality and impact defy their modest means or proportions. Next week, the Rhode Island International Film Festival will screen The House At The Edge of the Galaxy, an allegorical short film about a lonely boy who is taught to “plant a star” by a passing Cosmonaut. The story is a simple sci-fi parable about escape and entrapment, but its compact architecture houses a labyrinth of other meanings, all brought together with a gentle touch by director Gleb Osatinski.

As it turns out, the edge of the galaxy is actually an isolated countryside, bestowed with rolling hills and meadows teeming with flowers. At the bottom of a small ravine is an old, dilapidated house, where a young boy (Grayson Sides) lives alone. He tries to escape, but the house always magically lures him back into its hazy, dreamlike orbit. One day, the boy is visited by an old Cosmonaut (Richard Manichello) who happens to be passing through in his spacecraft. There is an immediate connection between the two that spans their difference in years, as if they both share the same spirit, or, at least, a certain kind of existential loneliness. The Cosmonaut teaches the boy how to plant a star seed and thereby awakens him to the beauty and vitality in his surroundings, fertile with life, possibility and stories waiting to be told. The desolate outpost transforms into a bountiful pasture, and the boy realizes that he belongs there, as a steward to the land.

The film was shot in a vacant farmhouse in western Pennsylvania, abandoned since 1954, with no electricity, running water, or roads leading to it. The filmmakers had to construct a bridge to transport the equipment to the location and had to rebuild the crumbling foundations of the house, which would otherwise have been too treacherous for filming. The adversity paid off. The house is a key character in the film, depicting an imaginary place where time has frozen, and a perfect vessel for Osatinski’s slow, pondering camera movements. The cinematography and camerawork are the film’s defining attributes and give it added psychological weight. Shafts of dappled light seep through treetops and cracks in the house, illuminating a nostalgic, sepia color palette. Meanwhile, the camera is always searching and revealing, as if roving through the world of someone’s subconscious.

Osatinski, who is Russian born, cites Andrei Tarkovsky as a principal influence, and the lineage is certainly palpable, both in the film’s poetic rhythm and in its exploration of the borderlands between magic and metaphysics, past and future, place and dream. There is clear parity between the rural landscape and surreality of Tarkovsky’s Mirror and Osatinski’s film, but the latter tracks a more traditional narrative arc and a clearer moral.

Osatinski’s admiration for his cinematic forebear is evidenced by his commitment to mounting the camera on a dolly, an ambitious imperative for an independent film working on a tight schedule. The uneven terrain made each set-up difficult, requiring the crew to level the dolly track on the hills surrounding the house. Yet it is this unflinching attention to details that gives the film its grace.

The score, composed and performed on piano by Romain Collin, particularly benefits from this rigor. The original recording was converted from a digital format to analog tape and then back to digital, just to give the sound the extra warmth we associate with our old machines. During one sequence, in which methodical piano chords accompany scenes of the boy tending to the seed he has planted, the music sounds like it is playing through an old gramophone, wafting through an open window into the sun-drenched air. The wistful flutter layered onto the sound resonates with the images of a child’s ritual.

In working with seven-year-old Grayson Sides, Osatinski took great care to cultivate a true friendship between his two leads. The exercises Osatinski put them through resulted in a strong chemistry that breathes life into their characters. On-screen, the two appear to be old friends, each reflected in the other, complicit in the same project of being alone. Manichello’s performance is an accumulation of small details, like when he pauses to reacquaint himself with his reflection in a grubby mirror hanging on the wall. Details like these portray the weariness of an intrepid space cowboy encased in an aging body. His worn-out nonchalance is a believable object of the boy’s fascination, but at the same time the boy seems to understand that the outer space he talks about is not a frontier filled with adventure, but an endless, tedious void, streaked occasionally with the light from a dying star. For his part, Grayson is wide-eyed and inquisitive, while displaying poise beyond his years. To encourage him to rehearse his part, Osatinski assigned Grayson a small project — to grow his own plant at home in the months leading up to the shoot.

The challenge of a short film is to compress into a short time frame a message that still has something to say about the drama of human life. Here, every element — costumes, location, choreography, music, editing, lighting and most of all, the performances — contributes to a fully realized statement, that all the wonder of the galaxy pales in comparison to the miracle of life on our planet. Sometimes, the most magical aspects of life are often the most familiar. If the project of a short film is to bring attention to these small moments, The House at the Edge of the Galaxy succeeds admirably.

The film is screening at the Woods Hole Film Festival on August 2nd at 7pm, and is in Rhode Island International Film Festival’s closing night lineup on August 11th, beginning at 8:15pm. You can find more information about the film on its website or Facebook page.


The film is screening at the Woods Hole Film Festival on August 2nd at 7pm, and is in Rhode Island International Film Festival’s closing night lineup on August 11th, beginning at 8:15pm. You can find more information about the film on its website or Facebook page.

Leave a Reply