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A woman makes tea. Lorraine is a widow who lives in a dark, well-worn home with some degree of neglect. She has a mysterious companion, Benny, whom she makes tea for, chats with, appeases and keeps updated on the ordinary comings and goings of her everyday life. She's visited by Ruth, who is at odds with what's happening to Lorraine. But when Ruth sees the full truth of the situation, the boundaries between love, delusion and reality dissolve, disrupting Lorraine's existence. Directed and written by Andy Ayer, this strange and transfixing horror short traffics in the uncanny and eerie, tracing the psychic disintegration of a widow whose main companion is a mysterious presence named Benny. Eschewing the concrete for the atmospheric, its distinction is its evocation of a powerful, ominous entity that suffuses the film with equal parts dread, menace and magic, making for a fascinating, absorbing cinematic experience that teases at the dark corners of the imagination. Much of the film's power comes from its visuals, a flow of dark, textured and poetic images that seem ordinary on the surface but reveal sinister portent with close attention. Much of the visual focus is on Lorraine's home, a cluttered, lived-in space often shrouded in shadow and neglect, but dotted with almost occult-like details: a skull, portraits of a forbidden-looking man, a desiccated doll. Lorraine often moves in and out of a fixed frame, as if haunting her own life, bustling about as she attends to Benny. Benny -- or maybe his spirit -- is perhaps rarely glimpsed as a dark figure with a death mask, but we hear his peculiar groans, moans and whines as part of the film's excellent sound design. Through these bizarre noises and the sparse yet evocative dialogue, we come to understand him as temperamental, peevish, unstable and possibly violent. Questions loom as the portrait of Lorraine and Benny is fleshed out, teasing out whether Benny is -- or was -- real or if Lorraine is succumbing to dementia, for instance. As Lorraine, actor Joyce Porter offers a powerfully immersive performance of a woman isolated, possibly delusional and yet keenly sensitive, able to be both specific in emotion and ambiguous enough to sustain the narrative's blurring of mind, space and time. Concrete reality comes to the fore when Ruth visits, erupting in a terrible encounter that punctures Lorraine's cloistered existence and perhaps drags her out into a colder, harsher truth. Artful, spellbinding and darkly poetic, BENNY is, by design, a film that dances in the liminal space between reality vs. fantasy, love vs. resentment and truth vs. illusion. It leaves enough clues for viewers to piece together "what might have happened," but in its conjuring of Lorraine's living dreamscape of grief, dread and isolation, such clues will likely only be theories. That might frustrate some, but through the strength of its images and the power of its sound, it asks us to sit in the increasingly rare experiences of the unknowable and the unanswerable, especially when it comes to the secrets underneath the most ordinary of surfaces. BENNY. Courtesy of Andy Ayer at https://instagram.com/niteflightsfilmsociety.