Adman
2019 · 14m · USA
Directed by Ben Callner
Genres: comedy, romance, satire
Tones: absurdist, humorous, whimsical
A comedic love story told entirely through a series of fake advertisements, tracing a couple's relationship from first meeting through breakup via commercials for ice cream, gum, beer, and other fictional products.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a film that weaponizes advertising language to tell a genuine love story, which is exactly the kind of "wait, WHAT?" inversion that makes narrative feel dangerous again. Callner takes the most exhausted visual grammar on earth and somehow extracts real pathos from it, which most filmmakers would call impossible.
The formal constraint is impeccable—each commercial beat functions as both genre exercise and narrative stanza, situating itself squarely in a lineage of constraint-based storytelling that runs from Perec to Godard. The editing discipline required to sustain this conceit without collapsing into novelty is exactly what separates craft from cleverness.
The decision to let the *timing* of each ad cut—not the content—carry the emotional weight is what makes this work; Callner refuses the obvious beat, holding a moment a half-second longer when the relationship fractures, and that restraint in a comedy format is what elevates it from premise into something that actually lands.
Reviews
an unconventional boy-meets-girl romance that simultaneously muses on consumerism and commercial storytelling
a cleverly constructed comedic love story that explores consumer culture