Blue Berries
2022 · 10m · USA
Directed by Sam Millstein, Kevin Rogers
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: absurdist, melancholic, surreal
A man must walk thirty yards across the desert to feed a fish, but the berries he keeps eating keep stopping him. An addiction allegory dressed as a Beckett sketch.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Addiction-as-allegory is usually a pile of cliches — this one's a fish, a desert, and some berries. Tell me that doesn't sound better than another rehab monologue.
Painkiller addiction as deadpan desert errand — Millstein and Rogers loop futility in the Roy Andersson register and let the Beckett of it land. Allegory done with discipline.
Painkiller addiction reimagined as a deadpan desert errand the protagonist can never quite complete — Beckett-as-allegory with vivid shooting. The thirty-yard fish-feeding mission is exactly the kind of contained surreal task that earns its abstraction.