Dream Girl
2022 · 27m
Directed by Jeremy Max
Tones: provocative, surreal, tense
When unhappily married Ben (James Parenti) takes a friend's recommendation for an escort service, the encounter spirals into a sensational, frightening, almost psychedelic ordeal — with a surprising outcome for his wife Jane (Elliot Frances Flynn). Jeremy Max's 27-minute thriller, written by Ryan Delouya, turns infidelity into a thought-provoking take on fidelity and commitment.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Max takes the tired infidelity thriller and yanks it sideways into something genuinely disorienting—the escort encounter becomes a funhouse mirror on marriage itself, and the film refuses to land where you expect it to. Most scouts would read this as conventional drama; it's actually a Trojan horse for something far weirder and more honest about desire.
Dream Girl situates itself in the lineage of psychological thrillers that interrogate domestic life (Polanski, early Fincher), but the 27-minute runtime forces a compression that sharpens rather than dilutes its formal ambitions—the editing rhythm between reality and psychedelia demonstrates real command of tonal register.
The film's masterstroke is the tonal pivot at the midpoint where the surrealism stops being stylistic flourish and becomes the emotional truth of the scene; it's a single decision about what the audience actually sees versus what Ben experiences that elevates an indie budget into something that feels genuinely destabilizing.
Reviews
Jeremy Max's Dream Girl is sensational, tantalising and frightening, all at once. That Max chose a cyclic narrative is not lost to the keen eye...the short is an interesting take on fidelity, commitment and the human need to not conform to the norms.