Domestic Help
2023 · 19m · India
Directed by Raveesh Jaiswal
Genres: dark comedy, drama, mystery
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A timid clown named Thomas, who was never funny enough to make it in entertainment, is placed as a domestic helper for Jennifer, a busy professional working through a never-ending to-do list — but his job performance unravels once he starts noticing the abandoned children in her backyard.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A failed clown stumbling into a domestic nightmare—this is the kind of premise that shouldn't work but absolutely does, grafting vaudeville absurdism onto a slow-burn horror of invisible children and professional numbness. Jaiswal's taking the stage play's surrealist bones and making something that actively resists being comfortable, and that's exactly what I'm here for.
The adaptation from Julianne Jigour's theatrical text shows disciplined restraint in the translation to film, using the clown's failed artifice as formal counterpoint to the domestic realism unraveling around him—it's working in conversation with a lineage of darkly comic character studies about performance and complicity.
There's a single decision animating this whole film: the choice to keep Thomas's pathetic clown persona intact while the horror deepens, so every pratfall and failed joke becomes increasingly grotesque—that tonal friction, sustained across 19 minutes on what must have been a minimal budget, is what transforms a genre-mixed premise into something genuinely unsettling.
Festivals
- Bengaluru International Short Film Festival 2023
- International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala 2023
- Orlando Film Festival 2023
- Capital City Film Festival 2023