Once again, the horror genre is a successful vehicle for illustrating filmmakers’ traumas and experiences. This is true with HollyShorts official selection, Kickstart My Heart.
After a hit-and-run accident, Lilly wakes up in her home, seemingly okay. But, she isn’t awake, and the fight to stay alive has just begun. With the help of her little brother Richie, Lilly has to battle her inner demons to make it out alive, literally.
Kickstart My Heart is inspired by director Kelsey Bollig’s accident when she was run over by a car in 2019. As the credits roll at the end of the film, we’re shown footage of Bollig’s recovery and CCTV footage of the accident. She shattered 30 bones including all her ribs, spine, clavicle, and pelvis. Both lungs were punctured and collapsed due to her broken ribs, and her spleen and liver were lacerated. Doctors weren’t sure that she would survive.
The road to recovery is perfectly illustrated in this short film. The high-impact fight scenes demonstrate how hard Bollig had to fight to reclaim her life. And the demons, which definitely looked like they crawled straight out of the Hellmouth in the Buffyverse, show how ugly and painful those injuries were. Enduring a traumatic event like that weighs on a person physically and mentally. During the fight scene, Bollig connected the impact of blows to the actual injuries she suffered from her own accident. The short succeeds in showing how bad someone has to want to live to fight through recovery.
Bollig has gained numerous awards for her previous horror shorts and will soon direct her feature debut, horror-thriller Breeders, produced by Adam McKay and Todd Schulman.
Kickstart My Heart is playing at the HollyShorts Film Festival through Aug 20.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
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