ALASKA MIKE
2026 · 2m
Directed by Jérémy Brondoni
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
Maud, a reserved thanatopractor who opens up more easily to the dead than to the living, has her routine upended while preparing one last body for burial.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A thanatopractor protagonist is genuinely weird—finally, someone mining the space between morbidity and tenderness instead of retreating into cheap shock—but the dark comedy feels like it's working too hard to earn the laugh instead of letting the premise breathe its own absurdity.
Brondoni understands the grammar of melancholic restraint; the film's formal control—its editing rhythm, the way it lets silence do the heavy lifting—situates itself in a lineage of European character studies that prize understatement over revelation.
There's a single choice here that transforms a one-note concept into something alive: the decision to let Maud's vulnerability crack *through* her professional composure rather than against it, and Brondoni finds that threshold in a two-minute runtime where most films would've already given you the whole arc.