A Reasonable Request
2015 · 8m · USA
Directed by Andrew Laurich
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tender
An estranged son reconnects with his father at a diner to ask an unspeakable favor — a darkly comic two-hander that weaponizes the mundane setting against its increasingly transgressive content.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Two men in a diner discussing something that should not be discussed in a diner — the genius is that the mundane staging makes the transgressive content funnier and more disturbing simultaneously.
Laurich and co-writer Gabriel Miller engineer the short's central irony with surgical precision — the film earns both its Sundance nomination and its Holly Shorts Best Comedy win.
Laurich runs the entire film on the tension between banal diner staging and escalating obscenity — the Dogtooth lineage of transgression-via-mundanity, perfectly compressed. A textbook two-hander.
Reviews
It's as filthy as it is darkly hilarious.