Doublespeak
2020 · 10m · USA
Directed by Hazel McKibbin
Genres: drama
Tones: melancholic, provocative, tense
A young woman who reported sexual harassment at work sits through an HR meeting where her complaint is steadily deflected, minimized, and reframed. As management closes ranks, she realizes she will have to keep working alongside her harasser.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects corporate dystopia to feel slick and alienating—McKibbin does the opposite, letting real HR transcripts breathe into something so mundane it becomes genuinely unsettling, which is a much meaner trick than obvious villainy.
The film positions itself within a lineage of workplace realism cinema while resisting dramatic catharsis; its formal restraint—letting dialogue do the work, refusing emotional uplift—situates it squarely in the tradition of late Haneke or recent Koreeda, though few shorts attempt this with such austere discipline.
The masterstroke is the sound design choice to let silences hang where you'd expect music or a cut—the absence becomes the complaint's erasure made audible, and that single decision transforms what could've been a procedural into something that *feels* like institutional gaslighting.
Reviews
Devastating, put together with elegance and poignancy to ask for our empathy.
The way her pain and disappointment plays out on screen is equal parts sickening and heartbreaking.
Festivals
- Sundance Film Festival 2021