Once the girl steps outside her prison-like home her disposition changes, relishing in her new found freedom, walking with her arms spread open and invigorating her senses by brushing along the plants. This scene relies heavily on the use of diegetic sound with the sound of insects, water and plants rustling in the wind being extremely exaggerated and combining together to stimulate the girl. This combination of sounds contrasts with the sound in the interior scenes where the only sound is coming from the television; this shows how much more of a stimulating environment it is for the girl. The editing also helps to add to the excitement of the scene by using jump cuts to give a sense of the exhilaration the girl is experiencing.

Shortly after the girl begins to explore, the dog runs off and she goes to find him. It’s at this point in the film where the girl finds the man stroking her dog, with the audience not knowing who he is or where he has come from. This allows the audience to interpret who he is in and what he’s about to do in whichever way they feel necessary, with the main assumption being that he is about to harm the girl in some way. This was Alicia Duffy’s rationale when making the film to help keep the plot and the characters ambiguous, also achieved by the lack of dialogue within the text. However, if we delve deeper into the language of the film we begin to realise that this man isn’t a threat to the girl. First of all the man is stroking the dog and the dog isn’t retaliating or being protective towards the child, this suggests that the dog knows the man and knows he is of no harm to the girl. The man also gently picks a bug off the child showing an intimacy between the two, this intimacy shown through the extreme-close up of his hand picking the bug from the girl’s shoulder. The man then smiles at the child and she smiles back, this smile hints towards the suggestion that there may be a relationship between the two characters as it is the first kind of human connection we see the girl have. The young mum is then seen standing at the door of the house watching over her child, she appears calm and composed indicating that she knows the man and that he is of no harm to her daughter. This again backs up the idea that he is the girl’s father.

Once the girl is back inside her house she is once again trapped watching the TV with no stimulation or contact from anyone. The editorial pace also slows down with the shots lasting longer and the lighting becoming once again darker.

Throughout the film the main representational focus is on age; this can be looked at from two perspectives with both the young girl’s boredom and need for stimulation and the young, single mothers struggling, both emotionally and financially, being represented. The girl’s mother’s age is being represented through the narrative storyline of the mother being a young, single parent who is struggling with money worries and who is also finding it difficult to care for her child and give her what she needs; this is a fairly stereotypical representation of the mother as society often criticises and has strong views about young, single mothers not being able to care for their children correctly. Class and status also plays a role in the representation of the mother as we can tell from the run-down mise-en-scene of the house and narrative of the story that she is from a lower class family.

One of the key themes throughout the film is that of Freedom vs. Imprisonment; this theme relates not only to the child and how she is trapped inside her house but also relates to the mother being trapped with the child while the father is free and allowed to do what he wants. This is a representation of gender as women are usually the ones to care for children when partners split while men are able to live their own lives; this is shown again through the close-up shots and dark, depressing lighting used in the interior scenes compared to the wide shots and bright, airy lighting used in the exterior scenes where both the mother and father feature respectively. The costume of who we believe to be the girl’s father also represents his freedom as we see him shirtless, the connotations of this being that the man is free and liberated.

Overall this short brings many ideologies to the foreground and raises many questions about the splitting of parents and how this affects children