What Invention 13 gets right, it gets very right. Oberst - better known as a musician than a filmmaker - has an intuitive feel for rhythm, and he cuts the film like a piece of music: establishing shots held a beat too long, then a flurry of images, then stillness. The sound design is the real star. Bach's counterpoint bleeds into ambient noise and back again, so that wind through a window and a trill in the right hand become indistinguishable. It's a smart formal joke: a film about an impossible piece of music that is itself structured like one.
Cohen is well cast as a man slowly losing an argument with an inanimate object. He underplays the frustration, which makes the moments when it boils over land harder. Howard brings a slippery warmth to Monique, a character who may or may not be a figment of Christopher's mounting desperation. And Bridgers, heard but never seen as Tabitha, delivers her lines with the sleepy menace of someone reading a lullaby as a threat. The film looks gorgeous, too - candlelit gloom, deep shadows, a piano that seems to glow from within.
Where it stumbles is meaning. Surrealism earns its keep when the strangeness accumulates into something - a revelation, an emotional turn, a punchline. Invention 13 piles on symbols (mirrors, metronomes, a recurring motif of hands that don't belong to anyone) without ever cashing them in. The final minutes gesture toward a twist that feels less like a payoff and more like a shrug. There's a version of this film that trusts its images and simply lets the dread sit; instead, Oberst keeps adding, and the spell thins.
It also has to be said that fifteen minutes is a brutal length for this kind of ambiguity. Features can afford to wander. Shorts have to earn every second, and a few of these seconds - a slow pan, an extended close-up on sheet music - feel like padding in a film that can't afford any. The pieces are all there. The arrangement isn't.
Still, there's real promise here. Oberst has an eye, a sense of pace, and - crucially - the restraint to leave his monster off-screen. Invention 13 plays like a proof of concept for something longer and stranger. On its own terms, it's an intriguing misfire from a filmmaker worth watching.
