Bill and Joe Go Duck Hunting
2021 · 22m · USA
Directed by Auden Lincoln-Vogel
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, surreal
Two friends with contrasting personalities — the chatty Joe and the stoic Bill — embark on a duck hunting trip whose ordinary banter about gear and football gradually drifts into something quieter, stranger, and dream-like. The great outdoors becomes the setting for an oppressive huis-clos punctuated by awkward silences and deadpan humor.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A duck hunting trip that refuses to stay a duck hunting trip — Lincoln-Vogel pulls the rug out so gradually you don't notice the ground disappearing, turning a two-hander about football and gear into something genuinely uncanny and mythic, which is exactly the kind of genre-resistance most scouts would sleep on.
The formal architecture here is meticulous: naturalistic dialogue and framing slowly dissolve into dreamlike pacing and visual abstraction, a deliberate deconstruction of the realist two-hander that situates itself against both classical landscape cinema and contemporary indie naturalism.
The decision to let silence gradually overtake the banter is what makes this work—that slow draining of dialogue until the landscape itself becomes the conversation, a sound design choice that transforms a modest premise into something genuinely disorienting on a shoestring budget.
Reviews
A quietly assured, gently funny, portrait of man and nature.
The film begins to slowly fade into the unknown following an almost dream-like haze.
Festivals
- Cannes Film Festival 2021
- Leeds International Film Festival 2021
- Montreal Independent Film Festival 2022