Don't Get Me Wrong
2025 · 10m · USA
Directed by Corey Sherman
Genres: animation, dark comedy, drama
Tones: dark, darkly comic, surreal
A man discovers a mysterious television set that lets him hear every bad thing ever said about him. What begins as idle curiosity spirals into obsession, transforming him into a bloated, grotesque surveillance tyrant policing his own social circle.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
TV that lets you hear what people say about you, and the protagonist bloats into a surveillance tyrant — gossip-as-body-horror is the right metaphor for 2025. The 2K-views YouTube release suggests it hasn't found its audience yet, which is sometimes a good sign.
Literalizing gossip-eavesdropping as body horror — the protagonist physically bloating from what he overhears — is precisely the kind of metaphor animation justifies its existence to perform, in the Hertzfeldt-Cronenberg vein. A small audience number suggests the film hasn't found its moment yet; the conceit deserves one.
Literalizing gossip as a physical addiction where the body bloats and grotesques — that's animation doing what live action structurally can't. Nine forty-two with a 50-inch TV as the cursed object is a tight, focused conceit.
Reviews
Sherman pushes the premise into darker territory, revealing what happens when curiosity turns into obsession. Vindicated by his newfound omniscience, Neil transforms his social circle into a miniature surveillance state—and by the final image, bloated and grotesque, the film makes clear that the ugliness of gossip cuts both ways.