Portrait of God is a Religious Horror horror short film posted on YouTube on August 28th, 2022.
It follows a young woman, Mia, as she practices a presentation on a painting titled "Portrait of God". She grows frustrated as she doesn't see what she wants, but what she ends up seeing challenges her beliefs.
You can watch the film here
and its Making Of video here.
Note that due to the ambiguous nature of the film and the short runtime, all spoilers will be unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
Portrait of God contains examples of:
- Admiring the Abomination: Of all the audio testimonials from the people who saw something in the painting, the last one sounds entirely too convinced when saying "It's... beautiful...".
- Ambiguously Evil: God Himself. Due to its creepy appearance and the ambiguous fate of Mia, you assume that it's evil, but there is no solid proof that it is acting with malicious intent or not. Also, one has to keep in mind the Blue-and-Orange Morality that it may have in this situation.
- Brown Note: Seeing the figure, even in portrait form, is enough to seriously unnerve some people, but when Mia sees it, and then its light, in real life, she's rendered catatonic, fixed in the same spot motionless for 3 hours straight and gripping her cross so hard she bleeds.
- Creepily Long Arms: Implied. When the figure reaches out to Mia, you don't see it move at all from its position that looks to be about 2 or 3 feet from her as it reaches out its hand and grabs her chin. Accounting for the fact that its arms aren't fully extended, this would make its arms over 3 and a half feet long.
- The Darkness Gazes Back: The most identifiable thing about the figure is its beady, shining eyes that are always piercing through the darkness of the film.
- Dramatic Spotlight: As Mia escapes from the projector room and into another, the lights in the latter completely shut off except for one overhead light that acts as a spotlight.
- Emerging from the Shadows:
- The figure slowly becomes visible in the painting. This is originally played as Mia finally seeing it, but as she raises the projector screen, it's revealed the figure was doing this the whole time.
- The figure also slowly and painstakingly does this at the end as it approaches Mia.
- Epigraph:No man shall see Me and live.-Exodus 33:20.
- Extreme Graphical Representation (the blinkenlights variant): Due to the electronic equipment in the background and its array of status lights, you'll likely miss the fact that two of them aren't always in the same place.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: As Mia is going back to the beginning of her presentation, you can briefly see the figure in the portrait slide.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: After the credits fade out, there is briefly what looks like a black screen before the video ends. If you turn up your brightness up a little bit, though, you will see God staring right at you.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus:
- As the audio testimonials play, you can see the figure standing in the left corner of the room, right next to Mia.
- As mentioned above, you can see the figure in the portrait slide as Mia is resetting back to the start of her presentation.
- Glowing Eyes of Doom:
- The creature is only visible as two pinpoints of light if there's no other light source around.
- Mia gets these when hypnotized by the creature's Throat Light.
- Ghostly Gape: The figure sports a terrifying one, at least until it unhinges its jaw.
- Heartbeat Soundtrack: When Mia sees the figure in the painting, we hear a thumping sound resembling a heartbeat in the background getting louder and faster as she realizes the figure is right there with her.
- Hope Spot: A very brief one. As Mia escapes the projector room that was shrouded in darkness, she stumbles into a fully lit room before the lights shut off and a single spotlight shines down on her as she sees the figure in the room with her.
- Humanoid Abomination: The figure vaguely resembles a very gaunt, wrinkled man with a hell of a Nightmare Face.
- Lean and Mean: One of the constants in the descriptions of the figure is that it's very skinny. They were correct.
- Motif: The film constantly plays on Dark Is Evil / Light Is Good.
- The projector room is lit only by the projector itself, and Mia's face is lit up by the laptop screen, but other than that, the room is completely dark. This allows the film to not only play on the Primal Fear of the dark, but also to hide the figure until The Reveal that it was in the room with Mia the whole time.
- Mia then rushes into the next room, which is fully lit and seemingly safer compared to the projector room, but then those lights are shut off. Mia is left only lit by a spotlight, which, even though this film sets up the Light Is Good motif, only serves to make her look more isolated and afraid.
- Also an example of a deconstruction of Light Is Good - the figure is identifiable by its two bright, shining eyes cutting through the shadows. Which is certainly not preferable to darkness.
- Nothing Is Scarier: The film greatly employs this trope to heighten fear.
- You never see the true form of the figure. The closest we ever come to even seeing the torso of the creature is when it approaches Mia at the end, and even then it's purposefully out of focus and obscured by the darkness.
- This film is incredibly dark (lighting-wise, though it is dark in tone as well). This allows it to exploit the Primal Fear of the dark and smartly obscure the figure.
- Oh, Crap!: Mia has one when she realizes the figure was in the room with her the whole time.
- Religious Horror: Of the God Is Evil type.
- Rule of Symbolism: When Mia escapes into the fully lit room from the projector room, the lights suddenly slam off and she is lit only by a spotlight. The fact that this wouldn't happen in real life highlights that
Mia is no longer experiencing this in real time, but that now she's hallucinating. - Say Your Prayers: As the figure grows closer and closer towards Mia, she turns away, grasps her cross, and prays.
- Shout-Out:
- Possibly unintentional, but the way the figure unhinges its jaw and hypnotizes Mia with the light in its throat calls to mind Pennywise.
- The shot of Mia's head backlit by the projector is an homage to a similar shot from The Green Mile.
- Tears of Awe: Played for Horror. Mia starts crying these when she sees the light in the back of the creature's throat.
- Throat Light: The creature has this, which it uses to employ a Brown Note effect.
- Walking Shirtless Scene: As explained in the making-of video, the creature is played by the (shirtless) creator in a mask.
- Wham Shot:
- The mood is already creepy when the figure starts becoming visible in the portrait, but when Mia pulls the projector screen up and reveals the figure was behind the screen, the film quickly goes From Bad to Worse.
- After Mia gazes into the light at the back of the figure's throat, it suddenly cuts back to the projector room, where it reveals Mia has been staring off into space, crying Tears of Awe for the last 3 hours and has been clutching her cross so hard she has started bleeding.
- The Voiceless: The creature never speaks once, only opening its mouth to do... something to Mia's mind.
