Kentucky Filmmaker Spins Viewers into a Vortex with Short Film By David Goguen Vortex, a short film by Travis Smith, is a cerebral thriller that chronicles a tumultuous psychological journey through a remote area of Kentucky. The title of the film is appropriate. The visual narrative emerges as a 'Vortex,' where the viewer is thrust into a surreal and macabre landscape that ends in the glare of headlights at the end of a country road. What happens at the end of the road is a culmination of psychological events. It's not whether or not the viewer expects the ending or not in this film. It's what clues are picked up along the way and what we make of them as armchair psychologists. The protagonist of the film is a cigarette-smoking disturbed type-a young man who wants to reconcile himself with an inner world that's gone awry. Smith, the independent proprietor of Swanpond Films, masterfully uses a journey motif, where the protagonist is moving toward a destination. While watching, we ask ourselves 'where is this man going and why?' Other than the words of a radio preacher fading in and out from the speaker of a car radio, Vortex does not have any character dialogue in the traditional sense. Rather, Smith relies on a symbolic visual language to carry the narrative and bring the viewer to the climax and resolution. The music, also created by Smith, is ambient in nature and sets a sinister tone for the events about to unfold. Vortex is reminiscent of the John-of-the-Cross concept of the "dark night of the soul," where an individual faces his very existence and, in a whirlwind of confusion, gets thrust into unstable mental terrain. It's not a "comfortable" film, where all elements of plot are carefully laid out for the viewer to sail easily into a harbor of understanding. It is, in its travels along the borders of abstraction and reality, a film that demands its audience to watch and think.