Come
2022 · 6m
Directed by David McShane
Genres: animation, LGBTQ+, romance
Tones: contemplative, sensual, tender
Finn takes a regular route into a hookup and finds his personal axis altered, in a painterly animated short where every touch begets newfound meaning.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A six-minute animation about a hookup that gets introspective is exactly the kind of premise that could collapse under its own earnestness, but McShane sidesteps sentimentality by letting the painterly abstraction do the heavy lifting—the form itself becomes the subversion.
Come situates itself deliberately within the lineage of lyrical animation and queer cinema's meditative traditions, using its constraint (runtime, visual vocabulary) to achieve a formal precision where every brushstroke and edit rhythm compounds the emotional architecture.
The decision to render touch and intimacy through painterly dissolve rather than explicit gesture—letting pigment and texture carry the sensuality—transforms a modest concept into something that couldn't work any other way.
Reviews
The brilliance of David McShane's short animation Come is in how it takes a common locale of queer cinema, the hookup, and shifts it into something potentially life-altering. Through the tactility of his painterly animation style, McShane is able to take us through Finn's journey via a unique intimacy where every touch and motion begets a newfound meaning.