“Golden Hour” creator Maureen McEly was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room a few year’s ago when she came across an article “that promised a world without grief — a future where we could simply visit our dead loved ones whenever we wanted in virtual reality.”
At first it sounded beautiful. But as she began to think about who would create such a world, and how much it would cost, she grew skeptical. She brings her complex ideas on the concept to “The Golden Hour,” a quietly devastating new short film in which a mother regularly meets with her dead daughter in an imaginary world — but suffers in the real world to pay for these escapes.
The film, which McEly wrote, produced and directed, plays Sunday at Provo, Utah’s FilmQuest, one of MovieMaker‘s Coolest Film Festivals in the World.
At just over five minutes, “Golden Hour” is an unusually taut and efficient short film. But it doesn’t sacrifice any emotion, or intellect. We’re gently lulled in by an almost unbelievably idyllic talk between a mother and daughter (Becca Howell and Daphne Steele, respectively) — then quickly see why it rings a little false.
McEly skillfully pulls the rug out from under us as we’re hit with one crushing realization after another. The film leaves us wanting more as we sift through the questions it raises about how greedy entrepreneurs mine our emotions and attention.
The short is a proof of concept for a McEly’s planned feature, also to be called Golden Hour. The feature script is a semifinalist in the Austin Film Festival screenplay competition and the Academy Nicholl Fellowship. (MovieMaker‘s house style is to put shorts titles in quotation marks and feature titles in italics.)
We talked with McEly by email about parenthood, loss, and working through pain.
MovieMaker: Can you tell us about the origin of the film? How did you feel about the concept of a virtual reality where you could reunite with people you lost?
Maureen McEly: At the time, I actually thought the idea sounded nice, utopian even, and I put it aside and didn’t actively think about it again until after the birth of my first child, my daughter. After she was born, I experienced a thyroid complication that caused a harrowing bout of postpartum anxiety, complete with months of panic attacks, nightmares, and the constant thought my baby was going to die. I eventually received treatment and emerged from that dark time, but when I did, I found myself revisiting the concept of virtual reality grief technology with a very different perspective.
When I believed my baby was going to die, the overwhelming feeling I had was utter panic at the thought of us being permanently separated. I was consumed with a primal need to be with my child, always: I would have done anything to keep her. When I thought again about VR reunions with the dead through this new fragile lens, I immediately began to worry about vulnerable grieving people becoming addicted to these reunions.
And, as the tech company landscape has evolved over time to become more exploitative and predatory in search of profit, promoting all kinds of unconscionable things for clicks, I also began to fear that the companies who eventually wield the ability to virtually resurrect the dead would actively court this kind of addiction, holding the virtual versions of our loved ones, in a sense, hostage.
All of these concerns circulated in my head for years, along with my own lingering, unresolved fears related to my experience with postpartum anxiety, without any defined story to weave it all together, until I happened to think of golden hour as the name for a company selling the reunions. And, for some reason, with that name, the entire short film (as well as the concept for the feature) appeared in my head, fully formed.
MovieMaker: Are you comfortable talking about how the feature expands the world? Do we learn about the perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately horrible company behind Golden Hour Reunions?
Maureen McEly: In the feature version of Golden Hour, we get to know the company, at first, through the harm they cause one family: a mother, her husband, and their teenage son, all struggling mightily in the wake of the death of the youngest child in their family. The mother is having an especially difficult time because she was with her daughter at the moment of her sudden death in a traffic accident, and she is dealing with the extreme shock of that experience and undiagnosed PTSD, in addition to overwhelming grief.
When she stumbles upon Golden Hour, in an ad that pops up in the app she uses to calm her breathing during panic attacks, it feels like a miracle – her daughter is back. She can see her again, talk to her, hold her, even hear her breathe, the sound of her heartbeat. But as she relies more and more on the virtual reunions with her daughter to get through her unbearable pain, living in the real world without her gets harder.
So, she retreats further into fantasy, becoming deeply addicted to virtual reunions, which devastates her family financially, as well as emotionally, since she lies to cover her growing obsession and becomes increasingly absent during their time of intense grief.
Eventually, we do meet the people behind the Golden Hour curtain and understand the ugly reality of the business model of a company built to profit off of the engagement of grieving people reuniting with their dead loved ones.
But by first viewing the Golden Hour company through the eyes of a grieving mother and feeling her firsthand experiences with the technology and its interaction with her intense grief and love for her child, I do hope to show both the extraordinary power of this technology, as well as the insidious ways it could easily be abused.
Because the thing about resurrecting the dead, even virtually, is that it is a kind of miracle. And it’s precisely because this technology is so potent that I find it so urgent to explore its potential dark sides to help prepare us, even hopefully safeguard us, against its potential misuse.
Maureen McEly on the Hardest Parts of ‘Golden Hour’
MovieMaker: What was your biggest challenge making this?
Maureen McEly: The most difficult part in making “Golden Hour,” as a director, was trying to factor my physical disability into the filming plan. In 2020, I became ill with a neuromuscular disease called myasthenia gravis, which dramatically affects muscle strength and stamina, and I honestly wasn’t sure if I’d be able to handle the physical aspect of directing.
This filming experience was a testing ground for me, to see if I could direct the short (and, one day, the feature). Luckily, with the right accommodations, scheduling, and communication with my excellent crew, it went very well.
Other than dealing with my physical limitations, the most difficult thing about filming “Golden Hour” was the inherent risk of filming outdoors. When your concept relies upon a golden sunset glow for a pivotal scene, you need to find a way to get that, even if the weather is suboptimal. On the day we shot the VR scene, we were dealt a partially cloudy forecast that got progressively cloudier.
Once we realized the cloud situation was getting worse, we had to act very quickly to take advantage of sunlight whenever we had it and get the bare minimum of coverage. If we hadn’t leapt into action to get our wide shots exactly when we got them, we wouldn’t have had a wide with any sunlight at all. But I did find sometimes weather can add an unexpected boost to the visuals – on the second day of shooting we ended up with rain, which stressed me out at the time, but once I saw the footage I was grateful.
I can’t imagine the grief-stricken second half of the short without that weather. The clouds and rain just added another layer of sorrow.
MovieMaker: How did you direct your lead actor, Becca Howell, on how to behave in the virtual world vs the real one?
On the page, there was a lot of direction in the action lines about the layers of emotions the mother experiences in the virtual world, so it was something Becca really internalized from the start.
It was very important to me that, in the VR scene, that we feel her conflicting emotions: on the surface level she is utterly overjoyed by the miracle of seeing her daughter again, getting to hear her voice again, her laugh, getting to hug her, but at the same time, over the course of their conversation — especially at the mention of Christmas, and her daughter’s hope to one day visit France — she is reminded, painfully, that her daughter is not really here, and not only is she gone, her future is gone as well.
They will never have a Christmas together again, her daughter will never realize any of her dreams, and those moments where reality sneaks through the illusion are excruciating. So, I really emphasized the fact that the brittle joy of the illusion and the intense pain of reality are at war within the mother throughout the VR scene, building up to the intense goodbye, and Becca did such excellent job making all of those emotions exist at once.
Once the mother is back in reality, things simplify. Instead of layers, it’s just unbearable pain. Her joy vanishes abruptly in a sudden, horrible transition that I wanted to feel jarring and horrible, like an echo of her original loss.
After that transition, I talked to Becca about making that moment of weeping at the computer something we had been building to the entire time, through all of those little moments of pain puncturing the illusion, all moving toward a huge moment of grief – almost like a release except after it, instead of feeling better, she’s just left hollow, only going through the motions of life until she can afford to see her daughter again.
“Golden Hour” plays FilmQuest’s 1:30 p.m. Sunday bloc, “A Future of Infinite Possibilities,” at Velour.
Main image: Daphne Steele, left, and Becca Howell in “Golden Hour.”