Here's a lukewarm confession for you: I didn't go into 2026 with any new year resolutions.

I didn't even make any plans, to be honest. Write, yes. Read, yes. Try to engage with my creative pursuits and hobbies in a fulfilling way, yes. But a plan? With goals, milestones, and schedules? Absolutely not.

It could just be the well-documented case of melancholia talking here, but making concrete plans for myself felt a bit…pointless? Alright, perhaps that's too dramatic. It's been a period of great upheaval, both personally for me and, rather broadly, most everyone else. The idea of setting concrete goals for myself when circumstances would most certainly crop up to complicate or derail them just seemed like a great way to make me feel like shit.

A bit of an unforced error, that, based on my experience of the last few years. Having things to look forward to or projects to work on was great and all, but I'm very good at setting myself up for a bad time when it comes to making long-term plans.

The one thing I did decide for myself, the sort-of plan I hatched one afternoon in late February, when I was just beginning to come out of my seasonal winter funk, was to engage with a piece of art every day. That's it. Find just one piece of art and experience it.

It didn't matter what it was. A painting. A poem. A song. A comic book. A short film. A long film. Whatever.

I just wanted to find one thing I had never seen or read or heard or watched. Then I would sit with it once I had finished my time with that thing. What I felt about it, whether I even liked it, was immaterial to the stated goal of experiencing it. Because if I stuck to work I already wanted to read or watch or listen to, then I was just checking items off a list of stuff I was going to do anyway.

I wanted to experience art that was completely new to me, without any preconceived notions of quality or taste. I wanted to do so as spontaneously and holistically as was reasonably possible, so as to have an honest interaction with the work. To allow the art to happen to me, as the saying goes, once a day for as long as possible. And, if I was particularly struck by something, I would write about it.

Well, it's April now, at time of writing. I made a very long list of works and narrowed them down to the things that I currently feel the strongest about. That's why I'm calling this piece “Volume One.” I don't know how I'll feel come July, or October. I don't yet know what art will happen to me.

So, let's leave the door open to more art in the future, and discuss what we have before us today.

Mute

Directed by Wesley Wang

Sometimes a film just hits you hard, leaving a mark behind long after it's over. Mute is one of those films. Wang offers a tight piece of speculative fiction that overflows with so much story, so much pathos, all of it hinging on a single, silent performance.

It's…a lot. But it's a really beautiful and human piece that's stayed with me for weeks.

In the world of Mute, words cost money. The wealthy have the resources to access language, while a permanent underclass must buy words here and there to get by. This underclass is rather broadly characterized as manual laborers, domestic workers, and racial minorities. They are the kinds of people whose voices are suppressed. Whose labor is exploited. Whose bodies are treated as disposable.

Kat Tramantano gives an incredible performance in the lead role. She plays a maid who saves up her meager wages to afford the words that have been denied her. Her world is small and grim. Claustrophobic. Tense scenes cycle between over-the-shoulder sweeps of her derelict living space and closeups of her face while in her abusive employer's luxurious home. She can't speak of her suffering because she has no words to do so. It's a truly aching silence.

The camera is tight on her face whenever her employer is present. This singular focus on her obscures the abuses just out of frame, but they are felt through her performance. It centers her pain and invites the viewer to sit with her in it in very candid, uncomfortable ways.

The supporting cast is quite small and not given a great deal of material to work with. The actors get the job done, but I feel these spoken lines are the weaker elements of the film. However, Tramantano really carries it on the strength of her presence and subjectivity. She absolutely shines here.

Mute is a heartbreaking dystopia, but it offers moments of resistance within these horrific systems. Here, speaking in and of itself is a powerful act of agency, even if it's only a single word. There is something truly beautiful in that.

Endearing Evil Art

I first encountered S.D. Smith's work at a local arts and crafts show here in South Florida. Under the name Endearing Evil Art, Smith creates compelling horror illustrations. At once grotesque in content and humorous in the execution, Smith's illustrations are so uniquely appealing to me.

In fact, I immediately snatched up four prints at her table, simply because I had to stop there or risk buying everything she had for sale.

The subjects range from familiar monsters of the screen and page to the authors that created them. Vampires, slasher killers, gothic heroines. Smith makes playful use of color, texture, and proportion throughout her work. Figures are stretched or squashed, their teeth or eyes too big, their hands too long. The approach to space and composition is stark, often surreal, stripped down to the figure and their uncompromising, bug-eyed gaze.

It's funny and uncanny at once, in that uncomfortable way that distorted forms can draw out a nervous chuckle. Sometimes, it's just cute. Loose and scrawling, like a child's intuitive scribblings, and so very cute.

I truly adore Smith's illustrations. I'm so glad I was able to support her work and pick up some prints for myself. Now I recommend you do the same if you enjoy this kind of work as much as I do.

Shop: Endearing Evil Art

Instagram: @EndearingEvilArt

The Hunt Among the Green

Directed by Braiden Ortiz

One thing you need to know about me is that I'm an absolute mark for stop-motion horror films. I'm always on the lookout for interesting takes on uncomfortable or ugly material that uses the medium of stop-motion clay animation to its advantage. The Hunt Among the Green is really a masterclass in this kind of horror.

Following the now well-trodden territory of a children's television program gone wrong, the film subverts the expectations of internet-poisoned viewers such as myself to aim for a more ambiguous dread. It's all there: the fake Nick Jr.-style bumpers, the chunky clay characters, the friendly commercial mascots, the old broadcast television artifacts. It's all just a bit too perfect. You and I, we've seen this before.

But instead of the show veering into the territory of creepypasta kid show or cursed lost media, The Hunt Among the Green uses the familiar imagery of the early 2000s kids TV programming block to prod at the very real horrors of becoming lost in the woods as a child.

There are no easy answers. There are no familiar plot twists. It's just a girl in the woods at night, and all the terror that comes with it. And it's absolutely worth your time.

Gallery of Dez

Dez is another local artist I recently encountered while wandering around our nearest indie arts and crafts bizarre. And I'm so glad that I did. Everything about Dez's work is designed to activate the part of my brain that comes alive when I read JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. It's aesthetic excess put to truly exciting ends.

Where do I start? What should I say? It's the hyperrealist styling and fashion sense. The bombastic color. The layered patterns and textures. The playful shapes. The boldness of the lineart. The satisfying gleam of big fat highlights in hair and on skin. The way Dez renders every wisp of a fur coat or the facet of every oversized diamond.

It's all so cool, and I love it so much. I want Dez murals on every street corner in America. Dez album art. Dez superhero comics. Dez shounen anime.

I was so excited to pick up some of her artwork. If you enjoy this type of thing, please check out her work.

Store: Gallery of Dez Studios

Instagram: @galleryofdez

Train of Remembrance

Directed by Gabriel Reyes

I don't quite know where to start with this…series? Duology? Digital amalgam? Full motion video game? Even precise categorization eludes me. What I will say is that the as-of-now two-part short film project from auteur Gabriel Reyes is truly a strange and fascinating beast.

Scenes rendered in garish 90s/00s-style computer graphics create uncanny backdrops for the actors to occupy. There are train cars and psychiatric offices, bare industrial spaces and looming cityscapes. Short animated loops provide some semblance of time passing in the absence of real locations and natural light. Everything is blocky and ugly with gleaming jagged edges, like the engine running it is about to crash.

The actors give stilted, unnatural performances. They don't so much read lines as they fire them off self-consciously, as if aware of the intrusion of the camera and its gaze. Some performers fail to control their expressions in a few instances, delivering lines flatly in others. Together, the actors are doing far too much to create a sense of dynamism in otherwise static scenes.

All of it is deeply strange, and sometimes a little bit funny. It feels like a PlayStation video game cutscene, or a 90s PC FMV game. The whole thing is so artificial that I don't know what's canny direction and what's sincere inexperience. It's an interesting feeling to have!

The project is principally concerned with the nature of dreams. Perception. The self. There is a deep, pulsing anxiety at its core around the intrinsic intimacy of the dream. Who dreams, how one dreams, who gets to share those dreams, and what those dreams say about us once they are exposed -- it's all tied up in this absurd, strangely sincere little knot.

In reaching for a comparison, however useless the exercise might be, the only thing I could get a grasp on was the third season of Twin Peaks. I don't mean to say that Train of Remembrance is Lynchian; Reyes has a distinct aesthetic sense as a filmmaker, and I don't want to flatten or diminish his work with a casual remark. I will say that nothing else has ever made me feel the very specific way the third season of Twin Peaks has made me feel besides this project.

They're very much vibrating on the same wavelength. That's pretty cool, if you ask me. And while I can't say I loved Train of Remembrance, I'm glad that I took the time to sit with it. Some of the imagery is so striking, the scenes so strangely composed, the performances so uncomfortably earnest, that it's stuck with me in the weeks since my first viewing. I appreciate having had the experience.

Ersatz

Directed by Saint Greaver

Let's just get this out of the way: I love Ersatz. The degree to which I love Ersatz is difficult to articulate without hooting and/or hollering. You may see me hoot and/or holler by the end of this very newsletter.

Consisting so far of a pilot episode and an upcoming series of shorts (at least one short is in production at time of writing), animator Saint Greaver has managed something really stunning with this project. Ersatz is a dystopian alternate history science fiction-fantasy, rendering Greaver's harrowing vision of World War I trench warfare in 3D animation. The battlefield is vast, the trenches appear endless, and the sun shall never set on the British empire simply because it will no longer allow its soldiers to rest.

The story follows Mophead, an amnesiac soldier who awakes in a bunk surrounded by their fellow infantrymen. Each of the soldiers are mangled, made monstrous with faces fused to gas masks or mouths exploded into rows of jagged teeth. Mophead has no memory of who they are or how they got here, and certainly no idea how to fight. No one can seem to tell them about their identity or condition. Instead, they are simply handed a rifle, a gas mask, and a helmet.

And when Mophead is immediately cut down in the trenches, they find themself coming back from the dead with even more questions.

Everything about Ersatz just hits for me. The stilted, doll-like quality of the animation gives the characters a unique feel as they speak and move. They read a bit like wind-up toys, boardgame pieces, or, even more appropriately, toy soldiers. Their movements across bloody, muddy scenes feel trudging, as if they are being moved against their will by greater forces toward unknowable ends.

Greaver's character designs are truly gnarly, fusing battered flesh with gunmetal and rubber to create a haunted house's worth of the reanimated dead. They're evocative of the devil designs from Tatsuki Fujimoto's Chainsaw Man, and I mean that in the most positive way. The voice performances are quite strong overall and a confident, well-paced script gives the actors enough scenery to chew on. These punchy lines breathe a sense of life and point of view into each character, even with the tight runtime.

That said, I'm not so sure I truly connected with Mophead. I like the vibe and the amnesia set-up. Their voice actor is perfectly fine, as well. The performance just falls a bit flat for me. But when every other character is just so damn charming, I have no choice but to stan.

Now, far be it from me to wax poetic about stories featuring imperial soldiers or imperial wars. I feel quite odd about it myself. First Blood is also one of my favorite movies, so I already know I'm a land of contradictions. However, there are a lot of interesting ideas at work in Ersatz.

For one, the way death is suspended as a perverse recruitment incentive is fascinating. The ruling class promises a kind of perpetual servitude in exchange for eternal life for them and their families back home, only for these soldiers to become increasingly more distorted and deformed by each resurrection. Without death, there is no tangible consequence to war. The battlefield grows as it gorges on new territories, and, with no fallen countrymen to mourn, the full scope of these horrors is obfuscated.

The war machine consumes the world, and so too does it consume its soldiers. There is no glory here. Those who carry the empire's banner become little more than monsters, relegated to die and be reborn into battles without end or just cause. I think that's neat!

Even for all the intriguing ideas at play, there are a few uncritical imperialist cliches present in the world. One character in particular feels very “Mystic Eastern Man Who Helps the White Westerner,” which is unfortunate. It isn't a perfect work by any stretch, and I would be remiss not to at least bring up such criticism while glazing the hell out of it otherwise. But what works about Ersatz just works. Hooting, hollering, etc.

I hope the series continues. If not, for whatever reason, then I'm more than satisfied with the piece that we did get. Go watch Ersatz if you haven't already.