Appendage (2023)
Appendage: Basket Case, But Make It Serious | 3.5/5
Written by Noah Dietz: 3/8/2025
Appendage brings up feelings I haven’t felt from films in a while. Really specific feelings that, for one reason or another, only seem to come up when a very specific flavor of short films comes to me. It’s incredibly impressive how much of this feels like a clean extension of the 5 minute short of the same name. If I hadn’t seen the short, I would have assumed this was an adaptation of a longer form short, maybe 15 to 30 minutes long. That’s how a lot of this film feels, very punchy and with its face to the world. This includes, for better or worse, wearing its themes on its Louboutin sleeve.
From our first scene we see a tense family dinner to the first day we see at work, it’s clear that Hannah (Hadley Robinson) doesn’t have a hold of much of her life. Her mom makes a snippy aside about how she should watch her drinking so she doesn’t embarrass herself, and her boss is… Everything bad you’ve ever heard about fashion designers. Unfortunately for Hannah, she is unable to or chooses not to make a scene by standing up for herself in many situations, with each instance causing a pain in her side. We see that the pain is centered on a birthmark that, after it continues to pain her, grows into a small monster that represents all the negative feelings she’s ever had. In this world, an “appendage” is a small growth that can occur in people who had absorbed a twin in utero. When fed enough with self loathing and paranoia, the growth can separate from your body, taking form as a small creature who exists only to whisper your deepest fears to you.
Something fun about short films is taking an incredibly out there concept like the one explored here and running with it. You can get real weird with it and you are able to leave a lot up to interpretation. Sometimes that works out for adapting the film into a longer format, and other times it doesn’t quite land. The longer we sit in the world, the harder it can be to suspend credulity. Honestly, that’s one of the things I love about this, though it’s also the cause of my primary complaint. While at times this feels like a 20 minute short that got fleshed out into a feature film, it doesn’t have the drag that a lot of films like that can hold. The longer we’re here however, the longer we sit with our on the nose conversations about mental health, familial tension, and using alcohol to cover up our problems.
My largest criticism is probably that the themes are incredibly heavy handed in this. While they’re not handled terribly in the film, the ending message lands in a camp adjacent to the “Hey! Go to therapy!” conversations that so much online discourse has been reduced to. Maybe it’s because Hannah’s family is so similar to people I know to an upsetting degree. Maybe it’s because the tone of the film takes a turn toward the end from the “elevated horror” angle to a more straight up creature feature feeling. Maybe it just didn’t resonate with me properly for these conversations to work. Regardless, while I like it, I’m not sure how much of this sticks the landing for me.
We’ve got a lot of great things here. The performances from the entire cast are solid, I can’t think of anyone here who really phoned it in at all. The dripping condescension from Christian (Desmin Borges) and the whole-hearted love and support from Esther (Kausar Mohammed) feel incredibly genuine. It was heartbreaking to see Hannah pull away from her caring friends and push toward career goals, and even more so to hear her try to talk to her mother (Deborah Rennard) only to get the continued cold shoulder.
Something that makes me really smile here is that this is just on Hulu. It’s been a while since I got back the feeling of my teen years of finding some weird shit on the old Netflix selection. It’s incredibly important for streaming sites to have stuff like this available, not just the mainstream, by the numbers hits. Stumbling across something more experimental is an important part of everyone’s film journey, in my opinion. I look forward to seeing what Anna Zlokovic gets into in the future; she has a great career ahead of her if this is what she's working with now.