Date Nite
2020 · 17m · USA
Directed by J.J. Shpall
Genres: dark comedy, romance, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, melancholic
In a near-future world where a virus preys on romantic desire and inflicts grotesque physical transformations on those who succumb, a lonely man risks his health for a single in-person date with a woman he met online.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A pandemic rom-com shot before the pandemic even happened—now *that's* the kind of prescient wrongness that makes consensus critics sweat. Shpall takes the most sacred genre (meet-cute) and weaponizes it into a body-horror gauntlet, which is exactly the subversive move everyone else was too timid to attempt.
The film self-consciously stages its date as a procedural hazmat sequence, a formal inversion of the rom-com tradition that demonstrates real awareness of genre lineage even as it dismantles it; the editing rhythm between intimate vulnerability and grotesque contagion reads like a deliberate conversation with decades of romantic cinema.
The decision to shoot the central date in real time—two people trying to connect while visibly terrified of touching—does the heavy lifting that ordinarily requires budget or effects; that single constraint transforms a YouTube-scale premise into something that feels genuinely dire and intimate.
Reviews
Love & intimacy can lead to grotesque physical transformation.
How much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice to find your better half?