Dead Enders
2023 · 13m · United States
Directed by Fidel Ruiz-Healy, Tyler Walker
Genres: dark comedy, horror, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, dark, darkly comic
A disaffected, young gas-station clerk on the midnight shift must learn to give a damn about something after malevolent mind-controlling bugs are set loose by irresponsible oil drillers.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A gas-station clerk + mind-controlling bugs + oil-industry commentary wrapped in absurdist horror-comedy is exactly the kind of "wait, what?" premise that makes consensus programmers nervous—and that's precisely why it works. Ruiz-Healy and Walker aren't interested in coherence; they're interested in collision, and the film earns every weird tonal lurch.
The film's commitment to genre hybridity reads as restless rather than assured; while the dark-comic register is competent, it doesn't sit in any tradition long enough to develop the formal rigor that would elevate the concept beyond its high-concept hook.
The decision to play the protagonist's indifference straight—neither mocking nor absolving him—against the escalating absurdity of the bug invasion is what anchors the whole thing; it's a small performance choice that makes the film's tonal tightrope actually land.