All We Can Do
2024 · 20m · USA
Directed by Ryan Noufer
Genres: dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
A government program dispatches female agents to isolated men's homes for sanctioned intimate encounters intended to prevent mass violence.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A boldly absurdist speculative comedy that weaponizes bureaucratic logic against America's loneliness epidemic.
Government sends women to lonely men's homes to prevent mass shootings — that premise is either fearless or insufferable, and the synopsis can't tell me which. The Lobster comparison is doing dangerous work here.
The premise — state-sponsored intimacy as mass-shooting prevention — is the kind of audacious provocation that either crystallizes or curdles depending entirely on tone. The Lobster comparison is the right north star; whether Noufer can hold that register without slipping into sketch-think is the open question.