Birthday Boy
2021 · 12m
Directed by Jordan Michael Blake
Genres: dark comedy, experimental, horror
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, tense
Wally's surprise birthday party spirals into existential crisis, shot on a family camcorder whose unrelated home videos periodically bleed through — an unsettling portrait of emotional whiplash.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Birthday party. Existential meltdown. Random stranger's home videos bleeding through the tape. This camcorder has seen things and it's not keeping quiet.
Family camcorder containing actual unrelated home videos that intrude on the surprise-birthday narrative — collapsing performance and found memory through the literal tape is the kind of material formalism I love when it's earned.
Shot on a family camcorder containing actual unrelated home videos that bleed into the narrative — that medium-as-content collapse is a genuinely uncanny editorial decision. Found-footage intrusions doing the haunting.