User reviews

This short is one of the Twilight Saga shorts which were part of an official contest for female writers to expand the Twilight universe focusing on one character before Bella showed up in the story, with the winning scripts then turned into short film. I guess that most if not all of the millions of views these shorts got were mostly down to fans of the books and films. Conversely I came to this as a fan of the work of the director Yulin Kuang, and really I had only watched the first Twilight film, felt bored, and decided it probably wasn't for me. So the only think I knew about this short was that the two characters are married in the Twilight universe, and this short is their first meeting – a meeting assisted by Alice being a precog of some sort, and having had visions of Jasper and her already.

Not knowing or being invested in any way does limit the film, but it was still enjoyable for what it does well – which is what Kuang does well. She seems to be very good at setting and controlling tone, and elements of her other work with fan fiction and romantic moments in the rain come into play here. Visually it is very nicely done, and the sweetness and flirty nature of the interaction is easy to watch. The delivery of this is very much driven by a great performance by Carter as Alice; no idea how her performance fits with the character as they are in the book or film, but here she is lovely, engaging, flirty, and alert. She delivers the dialogue in a snappy and rapid way which is engaging and contrasts nicely with the slower delivery of Johnson (easy on the eye and with decent presence) so the two do work well together.

As a story I was not so interested but the sweet and professional delivery, and charismatic performances all made it easy to be entertained by it for the running time. How fans received it I could not tell you, but as a piece of Kuang's work it had the type of directorial touches and control of tone that makes me look for new stuff from her when I see it.