A Minute on Each Side
2025 · 5m · USA
Directed by Jon Walkup
Genres: dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
James makes a microwave burrito for dinner, and over the few minutes it takes to heat up, his life quietly falls apart around him.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The title alone is a contractual obligation to subvert: one minute per side of some unstated conflict, and Walkup somehow makes the constraint feel like the whole premise—darkly comic, sure, but what's actually *funny* is how the structure itself becomes the joke.
A disciplined formal exercise that recalls the rigorous constraint-based cinema of early experimental shorts; the symmetry of the dual-timeline structure suggests a lineage from structural film, though Walkup locates it in comedy rather than pure abstraction.
The editing architecture here is the film itself—two mirrored minutes that refuse to resolve into easy symmetry, and whatever tonal shift happens in the cut between them is what makes this five minutes actually *work* as dark comedy rather than just a gimmick.
Reviews
Another remarkably clever, ingeniously shot new short film from filmmaker Jon Walkup. He's getting better and better with every new film he makes. And this is another impressive dark comedy.