A Kidnapping In Echo Park
2025 · 10m · USA
Directed by Elijah Guess
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
A woman on a scooter spots what looks like a kidnapping, then promptly loses interest because coffee. LA, distilled to its purest dissociative essence.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Anti-thriller of the year: the protagonist witnesses a crime and chooses caffeine. That's not laziness, that's a thesis statement about LA, and I respect the commitment.
Guess uses the inciting incident as a non-incident — the kidnapping as bait the protagonist refuses to take — which is a real conceptual gesture, not just a vibe. Rohmer-on-a-Burrito-scooter is exactly the kind of comparison that either delights or grates; I lean in.
Witnessing a kidnapping and abandoning the chase for iced coffee is a clean inciting-non-incident — that's a specific LA dissociative comedy register and the film's structure follows the protagonist's distractibility, which is the right meta-move.
Reviews
an apt portrayal of laze and passing time in L.A. with a character who, despite having little to say, is charming nonetheless