Bitter Fruit
2025 · 4m · United Kingdom
Directed by Kristin Duffy
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
Goaded by family and friends to finally try fruit, forty-something Clem discovers her body will not cooperate, rejecting it again and again — until she realises that not everyone can have fruit after all. A dark comedy about the body, expectation, and the things we are not supposed to talk about.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A forty-something woman's body rejecting fruit sounds like a premise engineered to make programmers squirm, which means Duffy's already won half the battle—but she doubles down by treating it as both grotesque slapstick and genuine body-horror philosophy, refusing the easy out of sentiment or explanation.
Duffy positions this within a lineage of corporeal comedy that traces back through Cronenberg and early Haneke—the restrained formal distance, the refusal to aestheticize bodily failure—though one wishes the film's thematic payload about bodily autonomy landed with the precision its 4-minute form demands.
The film hinges entirely on the decision to keep Clem's face neutral through each rejection, letting the grotesquerie happen to her rather than through her expression, which transforms what could've been broad farce into something genuinely unsettling and specific to her particular bewilderment.