Shortlisted for the Meta Morph AI Film Award 2025
Selected and Featured on DreamflareAI
Long List 2024 at the Unhuman Short

In The Edge of Wilderness, a visually arresting and psychologically dense short film, director Frankie Caradonna masterfully unravels the thin line between memory and madness. The story follows a young woman, Evelyn, who embarks on a seemingly innocent hiking trip with friends near the boundary of a vast, mysterious wilderness. Armed with a simple compass and driven by an unspoken mission, Evelyn’s mind begins to fracture as she hears haunting voices calling her name from the depths of the forest.

As Evelyn ventures further from her group, driven by a singular, heart-wrenching goal — to find Mara, her lost daughter — the audience is drawn into the unraveling layers of her psyche. She stumbles through the forest, chasing ghostly echoes, only to confront a devastating revelation.

The compass, her last tether to reality, breaks at the moment of truth. This symbol of direction, both literal and emotional, shatters as Evelyn loses all sense of orientation — in the wilderness and in her life. Its malfunction signifies her final collapse, an emblem of how her mind could no longer reconcile the past. She hasn't just lost her daughter, but a part of herself.

The forest — both beautiful and malevolent — becomes a metaphor for the untamed landscape of her mind. The film leaves the audience pondering whether Evelyn’s descent into madness was inevitable, or whether, in the tangled brush of the wilderness, she simply found what she had lost long ago.

Was she chasing shadows, or was the wilderness always calling her back to face the truth? The Edge of Wilderness is a haunting meditation on grief, guilt, and the fragile boundary between sanity and the void.