Taking his fascination with the variegated horror genre in a new personal direction, writer/director Alex Ferrari follows up the sci-fi techno-terror of his special effects-laden debut Broken with Daddy's Home, an austere and sobering look at the harrowing tragedy of domestic violence. Despite being brief (the film's duration is restricted to a single event in real time, nothing more), I thought the intended effect was conveyed very well. The jerky handheld camera movements, the girl's point-of-view, and the grainy resolution captured the sort of frenzied fear and heightened anguish of the event and made it quite personal since we share the girl's eyesight.

Still, I think the concept could have used more fleshing out or more of an original statement about domestic violence for the short film format. Ferrari ends his film with some inert statistics and statements about battered women and children, and because it's already a widely-known reality that this occurs and that it is phsycially and emotionally crippling to survivors, the whole thing feels like the sort of TV commercial prepared by not-for-profit organizations I see while I'm watching my local news. It lacks the multi-textured artistic reach which was done successfully in Broken. What you see is what you get, and what I got was less of an informative eye-opener than perhaps intended and more of a visceral smackdown reminding me of a dreadful fact of which I'm already aware.