A Simple F*cking Gesture
2020 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Jesse Shamata
Genres: dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, dark, darkly comic, tense
A husband and wife stuck in rush-hour traffic let another driver merge into their lane, and when the driver fails to offer a thank-you wave, their evening spirals into escalating obsession and road rage. The confrontation reaches a surreal climax when the other driver unexpectedly pulls over to face them.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Couple loses their minds over a missed thank-you wave, improvising inside a car with the director's actual dad as the boogeyman. This is my brand of pettiness escalated to felony — sold.
Single-location confinement and improvising real-life partners — this sits in Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure register, where bourgeois civility cracks under traffic-grade pressure. The Short of the Week packaging is regrettably broad, but the structural premise is sound.
Real-life couple improvising in a single car location with the director's father as the wildcard antagonist — that's a tight constraint set and the kind of staging where the performances have to carry everything. 8 minutes, 57K views, the road-rage premise feels built for execution rather than concept.
Reviews
Anthropologically informative, troubling, amusing, and, most importantly, superb.
A fast and easy watch, and a nice reminder that anger comes all too easily these days — not giving the wave is just a symbol of what we've become as a society.
Festivals
- Hollyshorts Film Festival 2020
- Breckenridge Film Festival 2020, Best Comedy Short
- Directors Guild of Canada Awards 2020, Nominated — Best Short Film