Deep Dish Apocalypse
2018 · 7m · USA
Directed by David Codeglia
Genres: dark comedy, horror, romance
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
As a zombie outbreak riddles Los Angeles, two co-workers cross paths on an abandoned subway platform, where one makes a confession, the other makes a move, and both try to escape alive.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Zombie romance on the LA metro is exactly the kind of high-concept premise that *should* be terrible, and yet Codeglia commits to the tonal whiplash hard enough that it actually works—the absurdist confession-before-apocalypse setup is refreshingly resistant to both straight horror and straight comedy.
The film sits uneasily between genre traditions—part romance, part zombie survival, part darkly comic character study—which gives it an interesting formal friction, though that same hybridity keeps it from achieving the kind of crystalline tonal control that lingers after the credits.
The entire short hinges on a single performative choice: the moment one character decides to make their move during outbreak chaos, and everything—timing, vulnerability, absurdity—rests on that actor's willingness to be sincere inside the ridiculous setup, which is exactly the kind of micro-decision that elevates a seven-minute film from premise to something real.