Boom Raider
2016 · 6m · Australia
Directed by Nicholas Cleary
Lara watches her last arrow and finds a way to finish off all her enemies using an explosive barrel, but finding the right angle proves difficult, in a fan-made Tomb Raider action comedy.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A fan-made Tomb Raider short that treats its own medium as a physics puzzle to be exploited — it's the kind of self-aware genre deconstruction that works *because* it doesn't apologize for the absurdity of watching someone spend 6 minutes trying to angle a barrel correctly. Most scouts would dismiss this as fan-fiction noise; that's exactly why it's worth the second look.
While the premise trades in irreverence rather than rigor, the film's formal constraint—solving a problem through repeated trial-and-error framing—shows awareness of comedic structure and the pleasure of watching failure become spectacle, even if it operates outside the festival tradition Margot typically favors.
The entire short hinges on one decision: to make the comedy not about Lara's competence but about the *geometry* of the problem itself, turning each failed attempt into a variation on the same shot. It's a constraint that makes 6 minutes feel precisely calibrated, and that specificity of approach is what separates this from generic action-comedy riffing.