Boys and Toys
2020 · 12m
Directed by Kevin P. Alexander
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
A thirty-something adjunct professor hits on a younger man at a bar, then discovers an awkward prior connection to him that turns her night upside down.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The setup screams predictable—older woman, younger man, bar meet-cute gone wrong—but Alexander somehow resists the easy cynicism and lets the awkwardness breathe into something genuinely strange and human, which is either the film's greatest trick or its most infuriating one.
A modest chamber piece that understands the grammar of romantic comedy's reversals and uses editing and performance restraint to locate real pathos in social mortification—the kind of formally considered work that rewards a second viewing.
Alexander makes the entire film pivot on a single moment of recognition—that flicker when she realizes who he is—and shoots it with enough specificity in the actor's face that the whole dynamic collapses and rebuilds in real time, turning a twelve-minute bar scene into something that feels inevitable and devastating.