Kickstart My Heart (11:48)
Dread Central; IMDb; Kelsey Bollig; Short of the Week; YouTube

This 2022 short film was presented by Alter in 2023.

I could have put this under "horror" (I did see it on Alter, after all) or "drama", but I'm choosing to put it under "action" mainly because I feel like I don't have enough short films in that category. (But also, the fighting scenes are pretty good.) I also want to say, this is the kind of film I feel bad about not rating higher than I did, because it is pretty good for what it is. And what it's about is a young woman named Lilly, who goes out for a run, and immediately gets hit by a truck (which was quite the jump scare, and I'm sorry for spoiling it). She then wakes up in bed, and... a girl is talking to her, and I couldn't tell whether Lilly knew her or not. But when the girl leaves, a little boy named Richie comes into the room to talk to Lilly, and him she definitely does recognize. Unfortunately, she knows he's dead. So her first thought is that she died in the accident, but Richie tells her she's not dead, but she's going to have to fight. And it soon turns out that what she has to fight is a bunch of monsters that are trying to keep her from leaving the house. Doing so would mean waking up in real life, and it's a bit unclear whether she really wants to do that or not, since dying would mean being reunited with Richie (who is apparently her older brother, though he died when he was much younger than Lilly is now). And I guess that's all I want to say about the plot (which is more than I usually say about short films' plots). Anyway, as I said, it's a pretty good short film, but... I'm not sure how memorable I'm going to find it.