There is a particular kind of dread that only sunlight can produce — the sense that a day this perfect must be hiding something. CELESTE IN THE SUMMER, a striking short from Director-Writer Hobby Holmes, builds an entire premise on that unease and then spends 14 unhurried, hypnotic minutes proving the instinct right.
The setup is deceptively simple. A couple, played by Freddy Carter and Alice McMillan, are living inside what looks like the last good day of the year — golden light, overgrown gardens, the kind of cottage core tranquility that Instagram has trained us to read as aspirational. But Holmes isn’t interested in aspiration. He’s interested in what happens when a relationship’s ‘perfection’ turns out to be big load to bear — propped up by something neither partner fully consented to.
As the film unfolds, the seams in this idyll begin to show, and what looked like romance starts to look like the architecture of something built, maintained, and controlled.
Acors Freddy Carter and Alice McMillan.
This reviewer isn’t wasting re-litigating plot mechanics because CELESTE IN THE SUMMER earns its late-film turn precisely by refusing to explain itself early. Director Hobby Holmes wants audiences to sit in ambiguity and they will be rewarded for their patience and trust that he knows what he is doing. What begins as a tender, near-wordless two-hander about a couple in love slowly reveals itself to be something closer to science fiction — not the genre’s usual not-of-this-world style but a quieter, more domestic strain. That is technology (or whatever it is) exists only to ask an old question in a new register: How much of love is connection and how much is control and manipulation dressed up as care?
That question is where the film’s teeth – sharp teeth I must add – are. Holmes has described the short as a meditation on the dangers of trying to control the people we love, and you can feel that thesis in every choice, from the loop-like structure of the “endless summer day” to the way memory itself becomes a plot device rather than a metaphor.
Director Holmes’s film does not moralize. It doesn’t punish its characters or absolve them; it simply lets the logic of the premise play out until the audience arrives on its own at the uncomfortable recognition that devotion and possession can look identical from the inside.
Holmes comes to narrative filmmaking after more than a decade directing music videos for Mahogany Sessions, working with artists like Billie Eilish and Hozier, and that background is legible in every frame. “Celeste in the Summer” is a short that trusts image and score the way a music video trusts a hook — it knows exactly how long to hold a shot before the feeling underneath it changes. Dialogue is sparse almost to the point of austerity, and the film is better for it. Silence here isn’t an absence of writing; it’s the writing.
The film score does the narrative heavy lifting that exposition in some other filmmaker’s hands would normally handle, and it does so with more precision and less condescension than a page of dialogue could manage.
That approach lives or dies on the performances, and Carter and McMillan are more than equal to it. Carter — familiar to audiences familiar with his SHADOW AND BONE — strips away any swagger here in favor of something warier and more internal, a man performing contentment slightly too well.
McMillan matches him with a stillness that reads, in retrospect, like withheld information; her best moments are the ones where she says nothing and the camera simply waits to see if she will. The chemistry between them is the film’s real special effect. It has to sell an entire relationship’s history in a handful of scenes, and it does, which is what makes the eventual unraveling sting rather than merely surprise.
If there’s a complaint to be made, it’s one of appetite rather than execution: CELESTE IN THE SUMMER is so assured in its restraint that a viewer may find themselves wanting a few more minutes in this world before the credits roll — a little more time to sit with the implications once the film has finally shown its hand. That’s a short film’s oldest problem, and a mostly flattering one to have. Holmes has built a world with enough emotional and conceptual density that fourteen minutes feels like a trailer for a feature, even though the short works entirely on its own terms.
What lingers isn’t the twist itself, but the mood it retroactively casts over everything that came before it. By the time the film ends, that golden summer light doesn’t look warm anymore — it looks like a held breath. “Celeste in the Summer” is a small film asking a large question, and it’s confident enough to let the audience leave the theater still answering it. For a debut narrative outing from a director best known for chasing feeling through music and image, that confidence is the whole story.
The Bottom Line: A hushed, visually gorgeous piece of speculative romance that trades exposition for atmosphere and earns every bit of the ache it leaves behind. One of the more quietly devastating shorts on the festival circuit this year.
Writer-Director: Hobby Holmes
Starring: Freddy Carter, Alice McMillan
Genre: Romantic Science Fiction | Short Film
World Premiere: HollyShorts Film Festival, 2026
All pictures courtesy London Flair