The Coronating is about a Knight, who is waiting in an unassuming room minutes before the coronation ceremony of the new King. Knight was an orphan as a child but by circumstance was brought into the royal family and thus this to-be King is their brother by relation. But they’re troubled by doubts about the character of their brother- they fear he has been corrupted and will become a tyrant when crowned, a pale shadow of the brother they once knew. A Stranger appears as Knight waits in the room, a wandering guest of the royal ceremony, and strikes a conversation with Knight about the matter in question and, in the end, what choice Knight will make.
“I wrote and we (I and my co-director Hudson King) made the Coronating for several reasons. On a surface level, I’m inspired by visions and dreams I see, and so I love escapist genre film, I love the idea of getting a window into a totally different world, a world with its own problems and rules and beauty, but I think there’s a responsibility to escapism- it cannot exist just to ignore the issues of our world, our reality, but rather to reframe and see them with a new perspective, and thus exploring the real, universal feeling of guilt and is a core axiom of The Coronating.
Knight feels guilty knowing the person their brother was and the kind of corrupted King they will be are two completely separate entities, the guilt one feels when someone you once cared deeply for has changed into someone unrecognizable, a sort of death you wish you had done more to stop.
I think a lot of people can relate to that feeling, and that was one I wanted to explore through a genre lens: symbolic fantasy and surreal horror. Finally, as film-makers, we think of our short films as our film school, I’m very much a run before you can crawl type person, I like biting off more than I can chew and getting in over my head, so we always try to push ourselves with each film, both to find our voices as creators, and to prepare ourselves for our next project, our debut feature film. Overall I hope the film is rewarding to watch and rewatch and interpret and that it can mean as much to you as it did to us.” said Justin Solaiman, writer and co-director of The Distorting Mirror.
“Many people have that one friend or two you grow up with and think it’s you and them vs. the world. These are your people and nothing will ever change that. Then after a while you may start to realize a shift in dynamics the older you get. You may not share the same priorities anymore, start to have less and less interests in common, start to feel progressively emotionally distant from each other etc. But you hang on to the friendship due to some sort nostalgia fueled loyalty. Then after a while you may start to notice certain decisions they make are going against your sense of morality or self preservation.
They’re going down a self destructive path you don’t want to follow but you also don’t necessarily want to abandon out of love for them. Then things escalate enough to where you have to start making decisions of your own. Do you do what’s best for you? Do you do what’s best for them? Is there a way to achieve both while still remaining friends or has the real friendship been long gone? Can you even help them anymore? Will they potentially hurt others?
This is part of what I wanted to explore with The Coronating and what resonated with me early on with Justin’s script. That immense feeling of guilt and confusion I and many others know so well elevated to a grand scale where the person you feel that way about in this fantastical scenario is about to be given immense power that could potentially hurt many people. And you have the notion that you have the ability to stop it. But can you live with it? Can you even change anything if you try or will you lose everything and change nothing?
That space of re-evaluation, meditation, past traumas, guilt, shame, and external forces wrapped up in a culturally amalgamated fantasy package is the world I wanted to help bring to life and breathe a piece of me into. Making this was a form of therapy for me and the best I can hope for is that some of these emotions can be felt on any sort of level by the viewer.” said Hudson King, the other half of The Distorting Mirror.
You can find out more about The Coronating and The Distorting Mirror here: https://linktr.ee/thedistortingmirror
