Aping
2019 · 11m
Directed by Ian Bousher, Theo Gee
Genres: dark comedy, experimental, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, theatrical
Everyone wears a label, and everyone is sent to hell with surgical precision, in a chaotic short based on an infamous conformity experiment.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Milgram experiment filtered through fever-dream theater—this is the kind of premise that makes you simultaneously uncomfortable and furious at how obvious the metaphor is, which is exactly why it works. Everyone else will call it heavy-handed; they'll be wrong.
The formal precision of the staging—those labels as visual motif, the escalating theatrical blocking—positions this within a lineage of Brechtian agitprop, though the execution sometimes strains under its own allegorical weight.
The decision to play this entirely straight-faced and theatrical rather than naturalistic is what elevates it; that tonal commitment transforms what could've been a PSA into something genuinely unsettling and strange.
Reviews
The irony is beautiful and its expression even more so. If the screenplay is stellar, Aping's cinematography and editing are what give it visual shape and hold it up.