Who would have thought a relationship between a teacher and student could ever be so complex? The English Teacher is a great short film directed by Blake Ridder that follows an English teacher as one may speculate, who is referred to as Mr. Robert. Throughout the film Robert forms an abnormal connection with his student, Jin. There are also some great shots and the composition of music connects beautifully with the emotion and imagery that is displayed in the film. 

The English teacher starts off with a scene of a lady-like figure riding a bike down the street then briefly cuts to Robert waking up to his alarm in the morning. The audience is then shown an email from a new potential student named Jin, who would like to learn English from Robert. We follow Robert throughout a portion of his life and rarely see Jin outside of the lessons but when he is shown he typically seems really happy, a stark contrast to Robert. We are shown a very depressed looking Robert with very somber and sad music playing in the background, where most of the scenes depict Robert seemingly missing something or someone. 

I thought this film was great because it built upon the emotion of Robert very well with hints as to why he seemed so distressed without ever revealing it too soon. For example Robert rubbing an empty area of his bed laying down, seemingly as if feeling sorrow. The timing works very well because it allows the viewer to guess and speculate as to what is going on with Robert then once the ending comes, it hits hard with a lot of emotion and a great performance by both Louis James (Robert) and Blake Ridder (Jin). 

I would highly recommend this short film is all around built upon very well and it's definitely worth the watch. Within the about 12 minute film it is very interesting to see how well these characters can be built upon within that little amount of time. Also the amount of change as you can see in Robert as he begins to connect more with Jin it's a lot all within such a short span of time, which this was executed beautifully. I give props to the director Blake Ridder for this film and I hope to see more from him in the future. I also hope that you get the same enjoyment from this film that I had.