Winner of the Best Narrative Short award at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year, Girl With A Thermal Gun shows that you can make a film set during the pandemic without it having to be a bleak, depressing film focusing on all the bad stuff that’s happened during the pandemic.
Girl With A Thermal Gun is set during the pandemic and it follows a Chinese delivery worker who receives his orders and has to fill up his shopping cart at the supermarket and deliver them to customers. But with every deliver he makes he gets the chance to briefly escape from his mundane life as he meets the woman at the entrance to the grocery store taking his temperature- the girl with the thermal gun. As the delivery man grows more tired and a feeling of loneliness washes over him, no doubt accentuated by the pandemic, it’s the thermal gun pressed against his forehead and the girl holding it that allows him to escape into a joyous world of song and dance.
Visually, the film is remarkable and so engaging as it draws you in with the wonderful music and dance scenes. Once the main character gets his temperature checked and sanitises his hands, he and the girl with the thermal gun take a magnificently choreographed trip through the supermarket picking up all the items he needs to deliver, and the film ends up being an absolute joy to watch.
It just goes to show that even though you’re making a film during the pandemic and even though the film still has that pandemic setting, not everything has to be all doom and gloom. Girl With A Thermal Gun is a light film full of fun and joy. It’s great to look at and to see the dance scenes taking place within the supermarket and just sit back and enjoy. Despite the fact everyone’s wearing a mask in the film and it is very clearly a pandemic film, it’s very entertaining.
With its music video-like energy, Girl With A Thermal Gun is sure to infect you with its joyous spirit and leave you wanting to go dance up and down the aisles in Sainsbury’s. Just make sure to take your facemask so no one recognises you and judges you! It presents you with a nice fantasy of the pandemic filling us with joy for the film’s entire 12 minute runtime.
WRITER/DIRECTOR: Rongfei Guo
RUNTIME: 12 minutes
COUNTRY: China
Film Rating: 
