Baby Steps
2017 · 21m · USA
Directed by Eric Dyson
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Friends since childhood, Kenny and Pete are closer than many brothers. After witnessing his father's suicide, Kenny sinks into a dark depression and fears he'll share his father's fate — turning to Pete for support as Pete balances the needs of his family with those of his best friend.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The reversal of the caretaker-caretaken dynamic is a decent inversion, but it lands in earnest territory where I'd hoped for something weirder—the film knows its own melancholy too well, which means it never quite destabilizes you the way a real genre-flip should.
Dyson constructs a measured study of male interdependence that sits thoughtfully in the lineage of intimate character drama, with a restraint in its emotional architecture that respects both the weight of inherited trauma and the formal discipline required to hold it.
The film hinges on a single recurring visual—the way Pete's body language shifts from protector to dependent across a handful of scenes—and that micro-performance choice does the heavy lifting that a 21-minute budget otherwise can't afford, making the emotional pivot feel inevitable rather than earned.