A woman discovers she's won a free luxury vacation. Then the truth is revealed. | My Nuclear Family

Peggy lives in a desolate town in the middle of the desert. But her quiet, seemingly peaceful life is disrupted by a door-to-door salesman named Frank. He knocks, asking to come inside to make a pitch, selling free luxury vacations. But Peggy isn't interested; she doesn't want to leave her home.

But the conversation continues, and soon the salesman reveals another agenda for his visit with Peggy. And Peggy herself must face the unraveling of her perfect existence, as she and Frank confront unspoken emotions and buried secrets.

Directed and written by Nevin George, this stylized, meditative short drama evokes the past, but the feel is anything but warmly nostalgic. It begins with a countdown layered over a nostalgic ballad playing over an unseen radio. It's followed by an atomic blast as a house disintegrates from the detonation -- an event that will cast a shadow over the rest of the narrative, as it will through history.

Then the film segues to a salesman named Frank Donovan at a door, telling the housewife inside, Peggy, that she's won a competition for a free luxury vacation. Told through chilly visuals and strained interactions, the writing takes time to set up the film's strange emotional atmosphere, which is as studied and arid as the company town built in the middle of the desert where Peggy lives. The tempo is slower, but there's considerable care in imbuing the story with a certain staticness eerie in its emptiness and rigidity, an atmosphere reflected in Peggy's inability to face reality. The camera, too, constantly seeks unbalanced angles, almost abstract, creating a disjointed sense of reality.

But as the salesman begins to make his pitch, and then intensifies his efforts to get Peggy to sign on, we start to see the cracks under his facade, revealing another agenda. That agenda injects an intensity of suspense and tension, turning the story into a thriller. Actor Mike Ogden as Frank finds a solid balance between someone trying to appease and charm, but with a desperation underlying every beat. It takes a while, but we soon see the reason for his desperation at a key pivot in the narrative. Delusional and disturbed, Peggy has refused to leave the home, even after traumatic events, and Frank is charged with getting her out before something unspeakable happens.

Hypnotic, uneasy and ultimately gripping to watch, "My Nuclear Family" is in the uncanny position of evoking the current blockbuster Oppenheimer, both thematically and stylistically. But unlike the epic scale of that feature, this short is a much more compressed psychological drama about the aftermath of trauma, both personal and historical. It's also about the unabiding grief of a woman who has lost everything, helpless in the crosshairs of enormous historical events, whose portent is still felt in their echoes, well after they happened.