A Sweet Tooth
2026 · 14m · USA
Directed by Presley Paras
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A driven Filipino American analyst who has spent his life doing everything right watches a long-awaited promotion slip away, just as a violent intruder forces his carefully ordered world off its axis.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A Sweet Tooth looks like it's playing the respectability game—Filipino American overachiever, home invasion thriller, the whole setup screams Sundance-adjacent—but I'm betting Paras subverts the genre beats in ways that will piss off half the festival programmers, which means it's probably worth watching twice.
Paras executes the collision of intimate character study and genre mechanics with formal precision; the film's architecture—how it stages the intrusion as both external threat and internal reckoning—suggests a filmmaker aware of how Haneke and Karwoski have weaponized domestic space.
There's a specific moment—the decision to keep the protagonist's face *still* while everything around him fractures—where you realize this entire short hinges on a single performance choice, and that restraint is what makes the violence land.