Entry Thirteen: Mark Gill

"The Voorman Problem"
Mark Gill (2014)

I’d like to start with saying that any opportunity I can get to see Martin Freeman acting is an exceedingly good opportunity. So seeing his name on the cast list for this short film immediately got

me excited. As well as Tom Hollander, who is someone you don’t see enough of in film.

Regardless of me and my embarrassing fan-girling, I found this short film striking and very interesting. At first, I wasn’t entirely sure what to be expecting, mostly because of the rather dull introduction. The first scene, Doctor Williams with the warden, didn’t grab my attention much at all, especially with the stereotypical “warden-who-doesn’t-care-about-his-inmates” kind of character. But as a whole, I’m entirely okay with that performance, since the rest of the film was well worth the three dollars I paid for it.

In particular, I found myself enraptured with the last scene between Williams and Voorman. In the first scene between these two, Voorman appeared as much more engaging and interested in Williams – they were, perhaps, on even playing fields, or at least Voorman acted as such. In the following scene, it’s quite the opposite. Voorman has a much more foreboding tone and attitude; there’s something about his behavior that reminds me very much of Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Q is a member of an omnipotent species, who in many ways can act how people would see a god – he makes things appear, disappear, can manipulate matter and time and shoot starships thousands of light years in a different direction.

In the second scene, Voorman himself uses the term “omnipotent”, and I see that as the defining moment of his character. Never had he denied his apparent abilities, but at the same time, he wasn’t as aloof about his godly status as he was in the second scene.

The moment where Voorman and Williams shift places, I couldn’t help but wonder if these were the positions that these characters were in all along. A part of me, throughout this film, was curious if Williams was the more “insane” of the two, and he had imagined he’d met god. Perhaps it’s just because of the kind of story this is, but I had the lurking suspicious that a paradigm shift was just waiting to happen, but it didn’t. I could very well blame my science fiction tendencies for that, wanting the big reveal of “everything is a lie”, since that’s always fun. But in the case of “The Voorman Problem”, I can’t help but wonder just how much more there was to the story that didn’t quite make it to the screen.