Die Badewanne
2016 · 13m · Germany
Directed by Tim Ellrich
Three grown-up brothers have a hard time re-enacting an old childhood picture in a small bathtub.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A premise that could've been saccharine nostalgia becomes something genuinely unsettling—three adult men literally cannot fit into the vessel of their childhood, and the film treats this physical impossibility as both comedy and quiet tragedy. Most scouts would've made this a sentimental father's-day short; Ellrich uses the bathtub as a joke about arrested development that actually *means* something.
The compositional restraint here is admirable: Ellrich's framing respects the absurdist tradition of Tati and Kaurismäki by letting the gag unfold through spatial geometry rather than editorial tics, each attempt to recreate the photograph a formally precise escalation.
The decision to keep the camera static and let the brothers' bodies do the talking—no cutaways, no reaction shots, just the cold physics of three grown men struggling against a porcelain constraint—transforms what could've been a thirty-second sketch into something with real texture and duration.