Writer-director Yam Laranas is a moviemaker’s moviemaker: A Hitchcock devotee from the Philippines who makes genre films that look gorgeous despite lean-and-mean budgeting. His latest, NightShift, is a thriller set in a morgue.
Like his most recent film, Aurora, which is now streaming on Netflix, the film concerns the fates of the recently dead—and how dead they actually are. Laranas’ research on bodies in morgues found that they often still emit guttural sounds and make sudden moves even hours after death.
And—most upsetting of all—our minds may still work for a short time after we die, allowing us to dream after our physical bodies have died.
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NightShift follows a young morgue employee (Yam Concepcion) who is trapped at the morgue as a storm rages outside, preventing her relief from arriving. Sleep-deprived and barely coping with her own recent tragedy, she has a harder and harder time differentiating between the living and the dead.
Though she doesn’t believe in the afterlife, she begins to wonder if she’s living through the end of the world. The film is expected to be released soon.
Laranas’ other past films include The Echo, Patient X, The Road and Abomination.
Watch the NightShift trailer—which debuted on Bloody Disgusting—above.