Basil King
2024 · 22m · United States
Directed by Daryl Della
Genres: crime, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
Three overzealous gangster wannabes must dispose of a pizzeria owner's body after a late-night meeting turns murderous.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Three morons trying to hide a body they created themselves—it's the inverse of every mafia movie where competence is the joke, and Della leans into the chaos with zero redemption arcs or smart-guy narration to let us off easy. This is the kind of premise that makes people say 'wait, that's actually funny?' before they realize they're complicit in rooting for catastrophe.
Della situates the film squarely in the Coen Brothers lineage of criminal farce, but the control here is in the restraint—each scene of escalating panic is measured against a formal understanding of how dark comedy needs breathing room to land, and the editing respects the rhythms of absurdist timing that separates mere chaos from constructed inevitability.
The singular choice is the decision to keep the pizzeria owner almost incidental to his own plot—the focus stays entirely on the three bungling disposers, which reframes this from a crime story into a character study of paralysis, and that tonal lock transforms what could've been forgettable into something that actually has weight.
Festivals
- Dances With Films 2025, Official Selection (Pilots)
- The Comedy Film Festival 2025