Boomerang

The scouts

It's a millennial-returns-home story, which is basically shorthand for 'safe family dramedy,' but Ebsen somehow mines genuine absurdism from the specific pressure cooker of March 2020—the lockdown becomes permission to crack open every unspoken family wound at once, which is either bold or obvious depending on your mood.

Ebsen situates herself squarely in the lineage of intimate family comedies—Lena Dunham's specificity, the Safdie brothers' claustrophobia—but the film's formal restraint, the way it lets silences do the emotional work rather than punching every joke, suggests a filmmaker conscious of what the form can hold.

The coup is how Ebsen uses the physical constraint of the childhood bedroom itself—not as nostalgic set dressing but as a compositional prison that forces every scene into a kind of pressure, and she trusts that one architectural choice to carry the film's entire emotional architecture.

Reviews

This is a family drama where the lockdown provides the motivation for three family members to confront the truths they were not yet ready to face, but it's also a film about the love they share, and how they all support each other. On the surface, Ebsen's short is a lighthearted comedy, but some of the topics are heavier than they initially seem with the authentic family dynamic creating a safe space where we feel like everyone is protected, allowing the comedy to prevail.