Bar Talk
2013 · 8m · USA
Directed by Lowell Northrop
Genres: dark comedy, sci-fi
Tones: darkly comic, tense
In a dusty Texas bar, a chatty stranger strikes up a conversation with the patron next to him — and the more he talks, the clearer it becomes that he isn't from this planet. Adapted from a Joe R. Lansdale short story.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most people would bore you to death with a chatty alien reveal—Northrop makes it genuinely unsettling by letting the menace breathe under neighborly pleasantries, a Lansdale adaptation that understands the weird lives in restraint, not explosions.
A smart adaptation that situates itself squarely in the Twilight Zone lineage of sci-fi irony, executing the tonal balance between small-talk naturalism and creeping dread with the kind of structural precision that separates craft from gimmick.
The whole film pivots on the actor's micro-choices—the way friendliness can curdle into something predatory without ever raising his voice—and that single performance decision transforms a premise that could've been gimmicky into something genuinely uncanny.
Reviews
This particular short is just great, low-budget scifi fun.
This one holds up nicely — an exception to DUST shorts that often stumble at the resolution phase.