The globetrotting journey across my Letterboxd Map continues in Costa Rica this week with Coffee.
Title: Coffee
Director: Jeffson Estrada
Released: May 13, 2021 (Digital – Costa Rica)
Runtime: 4 minutes
A woman comes home and is greeted by her partner, who is happy to see her. He pours her a cup of coffee and is eager to talk about their days. She sits, expressionless, at the bar while vigorously stirring her coffee, the spoon clanking against the bottom of the mug.
The partner brings up that the “crazy lady” in the building was kicked out for performing satanic rituals. This is the first moment we sense something is off as the woman turns and looks into a dark room. We’re not shown a figure, but we can hear demonic voices as she cracks a smile in the direction of the room. He then mentions that the lady in apartment #2 complained that someone scared her. He sort of shrugs it off before asking how her day was.
She musters up a “fine” before getting up and walking into the dark room. As the partner gets up to go check on her, he hears the front door open…
The score and sound design do a lot of heavy lifting here. The strings in the opening shot of the partner making a pot of coffee, the spoon against the bottom of the mug, and the sound of the voices from the room all brought an uneasy heaviness to the brief four-minute runtime.
Things are hinted at, such as the neighbor and her rituals or the neighbor being scared, and I wish we got to explore them more. Don’t get me wrong, the subtle topics serve their purpose here, but there’s still so much meat left on the bone when the ending hits. I would really like to see a 10-15 minute version of this.
But you know what? This is one of those instances where blindly picking something paid dividends. I now want to try and track down Jeffson Estrada’s other short films and hope to see him get a shot at a feature one day.