Breadwinner
2025 · 16m · USA
Directed by Camila Grimaldi
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, tense
An obsessive baker moves in with her boyfriend just as her sourdough starter develops a sinister, blood-thirsty craving — a tension-filled horror-comedy about the consuming cost of ambition.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Sourdough starter with bloodlust as ambition metaphor — Little Shop of Horrors via The Substance via TikTok fermentation culture is at least topical, and the love triangle with bread is a real bit. Worth a look even if the concept is louder than the execution sometimes is.
Sourdough-as-jealous-lover sits squarely in the Audrey-from-Little-Shop tradition, with a Substance-era body horror sheen — a comic premise that the description treats as both metaphor and monster. Whether the execution can sustain the conceit for sixteen minutes is the open question.
A sourdough starter as both literal monster and love-triangle antagonist is a tight metaphor — ambition as a living thing in a jar. Sixteen minutes of horror-comedy lives or dies on the practical effects of the starter itself, which I can't verify from the page.
Reviews
A tension-filled portrait of a love triangle between an obsessive woman, her naïve boyfriend, and the sourdough starter that promises her the world.
Grimaldi and her team use horror elements to craft a slow transformation of a simple sourdough starter into something dangerous, reflecting how ambition and obsession can start consuming a person.
Festivals
- HollyShorts Film Festival 2025
- New York Latino Film Festival 2025
- Brooklyn Horror Film Festival 2025