Barclays – Hospital (2017, UK) [4K Upscale]
Here's another unnecessarily creepy ad for you, courtesy of Barclays bank for their online fraud prevention campaign.
You would think this is a PIF/PSA the way it starts out: we see a young man who's been badly injured in a motorcycle crash in a foreign country being rushed to hospital, while he pleads with the viewer that he needs help to pay for his hospital fees. Just as he's about to give us the hospital's bank details, however, he sits up from his stretcher, his face changed from panic and woe to something a lot more sinister, staring at the camera without blinking or uttering a word. There's not a single sound while he raises himself up - he's very clearly not in any sort of pain or distress at all. His face is in line with ours, still staring into our souls before threateningly uttering "I wouldn't... if I were you". It's revealed that the whole thing has been a sham and that the young bloke we thought we knew and had been badly injured in a bike crash is actually an imposter of someone whose email account had been hacked.
Again, did they need to be this creepy to get their message across?! I remember seeing this on TV quite a lot at the time, almost every ad break, and bear in mind even though I was in my early 20s when this came out, it still evoked that same fear response I experienced as a child from seeing creepy stuff like this on TV. Even now, some years later, I still find his creepy stare somewhat hard to tolerate. And it's just the way all the sound cuts off, how he gets up from the stretcher in one movement with a single uninterrupted shot, his line of sight not breaking with ours. It really does bring out that primordial fear in you.
Upscaled into 4K using Topas AI.
Original: https://vimeo.com/253346330
Directed by James Rouse at Outsider.