Boys & Toys
2020 · 12m · USA
Directed by Kevin P. Alexander
Genres: comedy, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, humorous
A 30-something woman hits on a younger guy at a bar — and then realizes, mid-flirtation, that she already knows him. What follows is a tightly-wound spiral of recognition, mortification, and the social acrobatics required to climb out of the wrong moment.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's doing cringe comedy now, but Alexander inverts the usual power play — making the woman's predatory moment *also* her humiliation — and that nasty double-bind is genuinely subversive in a landscape of safe reversals.
The film's formal control—its precise escalation from flirtation through recognition to social vertigo—echoes a lineage of chamber comedies about the body's betrayal in confined spaces, executed with the kind of measured restraint that feels almost classical.
The entire short lives in that single moment of her facial recognition—the micro-cut where awareness floods in—and Alexander trusts the actor's performance enough to let the audience do the spiral alongside her, which is everything.
Reviews
A scenario we all have played in our heads.
A very funny short film.
Festivals
- Brooklyn Film Festival 2020
- deadCenter Film Festival 2020