High Maintenance is a German short film which enters itself around a woman who is unhappy with her relationship. The film is filled with many narrative twists and surprises, and maintains an eery feel throughout.
In the first segment of the short film, Van presents the woman as being unhappy with her relationship; the couple sit opposite each other at the heads of the table creating a considerable amount of distance between the two, as visually shown in the use of OTS and wide shots. The director combines this with extremely low-key light and lack of non diegetic sound to create awkwardness and present the woman's disinterest with her partner. The clever usage of having completely diegetic sound within this sequence adds awkwardness as it reflects the uncomfortable silence between the couple, and adds a slight sense of tension or enigmatic code as to what the woman will do about her feelings.
Another technique used by Van is the fact the film opens mid-way through conversation; we know little to nothing about the characters due to this making it all the more eery and tense. Van does this to again create enigmatic codes and perhaps to present the female as the protagonist, therefore creating a narrative twist or shock for the audience when she switches off her partner and orders a new device, therefore making her seem slightly antagonistic. This is due to the fact that Van has created a set of expectations towards the couple; we are lead to believe that they are just an ordinary human couple, slightly stereotypical in the sense that the husband works too much and neglects his wife, and the wife is unhappy with her lifestyle and lack of attention from her partner.
Dialogue is also another device which creates meaning within this film; this is due to the fact that the wife offers her first husband wine and becomes enraged when he declines, and the husband talks about the asparagus being tender. When the second husband arrives, he too rejects the wine therefore leading us to believe that the wife will become enraged like she did with her previous partner, yet when he talks about the asparagus he compliments her rather than being dismissive of her like the last husband. This leads us to believe that the wife has found her ideal partner who will conform to her expectations, so therefore acts as an even bigger narrative twist when the new husband gives his wife a massage but instead switches her off, revealing that she too is a robot. This use of secular narrative and parallels within conversations could be seen as a social message about the director's feelings on marriage; perhaps he is suggesting that women try to control their husbands and make them conform to a set of ideologies, and by presenting the second husband as being more active than the wife, infers that men should not have to be controlled by women/ their wives. This may also be reflective of society as a whole; by including the plot twist of the woman also being a robot could suggest how Van feels that we are all slaves to society; we are becoming more aligned with technology and forgetting about real life, as shown in the lack of depth in the conversation between the first husband and the wife in particular, as they have most likely had a deep / long relationship yet all they are able to talk about is wine and asparagus.
Finally, the use of non-diegetic lullaby music which begins when the wife orders the new husband, and continues throughout the film, creates a sense of tension and dystopia. This is because the lullaby music is contrapuntal to what is going on in the film, again suggesting that Van feels we are closer to AI being able to appear human than we think.
Overall, the short film is successful in capturing its audiences attention and making them active audience members through it's use of plot twits, enigmatic codes and the fact it is eerily close to real-life.
