Death of the Party
2020 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Melanie M. Jones
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, LGBTQ+
Tones: darkly comic, humorous, tender
After a night of onesies, tequila, and poker, a sister unexpectedly finds her brother's dead body as well as his ghost.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most filmmakers would genuflect at the altar of grief; Jones kicks the door open in a onesie and cracks jokes instead—which is exactly why this works. The film's refusal to apologize for finding the absurd in loss is the kind of subversive move that makes everyone else's serious-faced mourning shorts look quaint.
Jones situates this squarely in the lineage of queer dark comedy—think early Ari Aster meets the tonal dexterity of films like *Weekend*—but the editing's restraint and the careful calibration of when to cut away from sentiment keeps it from becoming arch. There's formal intelligence underneath the onesie.
The decision to anchor the entire emotional register on the siblings' banter—letting performance and rhythm do the heavy lifting instead of score or montage—transforms what could've been maudlin into something genuinely alive and specific. That conversational specificity on a shoestring is the whole film.
Festivals
- Vancouver Short Film Festival 2020