Bite The Hand
2021 · 15m
Directed by Nolan Goff
Genres: comedy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
It's July 1997: the Sojourner Rover has landed on Mars and Janet Leigh can't find the damn dog.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A woman losing her mind over a missing dog while humanity lands on Mars—finally, a premise that refuses to genuflect to what's 'supposed' to matter. Goff gets the surrealist assignment exactly right: the cosmic and the domestic collide without apology, and nobody else would've even pitched this one.
The film's formal restraint—anchoring cosmic absurdism in a single domestic space and anxious timeline—suggests a careful lineage with mid-century comedy and surrealist cinema, though the execution feels slight and the tonal balance doesn't quite crystallize into something memorable.
That choice to parallel the Rover's landing timeline with Janet's frantic search creates a rhythm that transforms what could've been a thin gag into something genuinely unsettling—the juxtaposition *is* the film, and it's executed with enough precision to justify every frame.
Reviews
It's July 1997. The Sojourner Rover has landed on Mars and Janet Leigh can't find the damn dog.