A Poop Story
2020 · 8m
Directed by Auri Jackson
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
A long-term couple's comfortable life is upended when the woman's father moves onto the couch outside their bathroom. Her partner's growing self-consciousness in his own home exposes dormant intimacy problems neither has faced.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The setup screams indie-drama cliché—couple in crisis, father-in-law catalyst—but Jackson somehow mines comedy and real tenderness from bathroom-door awkwardness without ever winking at the audience, which is either brave or accidental; either way, it shouldn't work and does.
There's a careful lineage here—the domestic drama refracting intimacy through spatial constraint, reminiscent of Chiang's rigor—though the tonal balance between darkly comic and contemplative occasionally blurs where it might have cut cleaner.
The decision to make the father's presence felt primarily through sound design and the couple's physical avoidance of their own space creates an economy of storytelling that transforms a bathroom-access problem into genuine relationship fracture.