Besøg / The Visit
2011 · 8m · Denmark
Directed by Johannes Skov Andersen
Birger must babysit his neighbor's six-year-old girl in his apartment, and not everything goes quite as planned, in this non-verbal comedy.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Non-verbal comedy about a man babysitting a neighbor's kid sounds like the setup for every sentimental indie dad-film ever made—except Andersen commits to pure physical behavior and lets awkwardness breathe without winking at the audience, which is genuinely weird in the best way.
A deceptively simple premise executed with formal precision: the constraint of silence forces Andersen into a lineage of physical comedy that recalls Tati and early Keaton, where every frame composition and cut *must* do the narrative work.
The entire film hinges on Andersen's choice to remove dialogue entirely, forcing every beat—a look, a stumble, a small negotiation between adult and child—to carry meaning through pure gesture and spatial blocking, and it's that single constraint that transforms a familiar scenario into something tactile and alive.