Cubicle
2021 · 4m · United Kingdom
Directed by Chloë Wicks
Genres: dark comedy, horror
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, tense
A young woman takes a pregnancy test in a public toilet cubicle, only to be interrupted by what seems to be a man and a woman getting up to some risky business in the next stall. Uneasy comedy tips into horror.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Everyone expects the pregnancy test to be the crisis—Wicks just uses it as a door into something far weirder and more uncomfortable, flipping the invasive-intimacy script until you can't tell who should be horrified of whom. It's exactly the kind of premise that makes programmers nervous and that's precisely why it works.
The tonal pivot from awkward comedy to genuine dread is executed with formal precision, the cubicle wall becoming a membrane between competing narratives that Wicks trusts the audience to sit with without spelling out the genre shift.
The decision to keep both stories audible—to layer the mundane vulnerability of the pregnancy moment against the transgressive sounds from the next stall—is the entire film; that acoustic claustrophobia is what makes four minutes feel genuinely unsettling.
Reviews
Cubicle is another great example of utilising your resources to their full potential and the creative benefit of restrictions. From there, Cubicle ventures into the uncomfortable, and in its brief runtime sinks its hooks in and doesn't let you go.