Awfully Deep
2010 · 12m · United Kingdom
Directed by Daniel Florêncio
Genres: dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, melancholic
A suburban family lives a nice life until a stinky brown substance appears outside their home; their son wants to clean it up, but his parents insist it is someone else's job.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A suburban family drama that pivots on *literal* shit—a premise so defiantly unglamorous it circles back to genius, the kind of satirical setup that makes you respect a filmmaker willing to stake everything on a stink joke and actually *mean* it thematically.
Florêncio's restraint in treating the absurd with suburban melodrama syntax—the studied blocking, the careful withholding—places this squarely in the lineage of Buñuel's class-comedy tradition, though the execution feels slightly underbaked for the formal ambition it's reaching toward.
The crucial choice here is the son's earnest conviction against parental deflection; that single note of genuine moral clarity in an otherwise darkly comic scenario is what prevents the whole thing from collapsing into easy cynicism, and it's held with impressive composure on a clearly minimal budget.
Reviews
The cast for this film has done a great job of bringing story's main idea to life, depicting middle class routines and a general funk of bleakness. At first, Awfully Deep struck us monotonous, however it quickly became clear that this is all intentional, as it served to demonstrate an emotional distance between the family, in exchange for focus on other things.