ALIGNMENT
2026 · 3m · USA
Directed by John Merizalde
Genres: comedy
Tones: absurdist, humorous, whimsical
A wickedly precise 3-minute comedy in which everything — on screen and off — conspires to line up perfectly. Shot on Kodak 35mm, the film pushes a single comic premise to its logical extreme with meticulous production design.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
There's something beautiful about someone applying this much precision — 35mm, full VFX, a seasoned crew — to a joke that runs three minutes, as if the only way to capture perfect alignment is to make the film itself an act of it.
35mm and full crew for a three-minute alignment gag — production value as comedy premise. Either ingeniously absurd or a beautiful waste; the OK Go reference scares me. Mild curiosity.
Merizalde deploying full 35mm Kodak production, VFX, and a feature-scale crew in service of a 3-minute alignment gag — the lavish-production-meets-tiny-premise math is the whole formal joke, and an OK Go reference is doing exactly the right work here. Lives or dies on the gag's mechanical precision.