Surviving a surprise sex party with your soul intact is tough. Welcome to the Black and White midnight party.
You find yourself at a sex party. This is not a fun surprise. What is this place? Why can’t you just go home? After his insightful and social nightmare short film ‘Status’, director Richard Williamson surprises us with another splendidly written film ‘Black And White’, about a man who unknowingly gets invited to a sex party, and has no way out.
This film came about as a concept piece. I was fascinated by the ultra contained story which played deeply with genre conventions. My aim was to make an extreme tension piece where the audience position constantly shifts from beginning to end. I wanted to make a horror film in disguise that had the tone a good nightmare is made of. I see the film as something of a morality play on screen.
Certainly the film’s main focus is its constructive and prolonged dialogue, something that filmmakers often turn away from due to the difficulties of pulling this off. But when you pull it off and succeed like Richard has, it adds an intense level of submersion to the film and it’s characters, a thing of beauty.
Tarantino’s recent films were a big influence on what I thought I could get out of an extended dialogue scene. I wanted to play with ideas of compromised rationality and how confusion and temptation can blind people to extreme truth.
‘Black and White’ speaks with power and extreme conviction, something achieved through exceptional writing but conveyed through fashionably convincing acting by the main protagonists. The film’s visual contrasts play well with the title, with an admirable cinematography despite the film’s sole location.