Drive Baby Drive
2026 · 2m
Directed by Maverick Christian, Victor Lariviere
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tender
A woman drives alone on a deserted road when three dull knocks come from the trunk; she stops, opens the hatch, finds nothing — then takes out a lipstick and performs her ritual, a rebirth on the silent roadside.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The knock-from-nowhere setup promises cosmic dread, but then it pivots to lipstick and ritual—a fake-out that could've been precious instead lands as genuinely unsettling, which is the opposite of what contrarians expect and somehow better.
Christian and Lariviere understand the grammar of American experimental cinema—the lonely highway, the uncanny intrusion, the redemptive gesture—and execute it with formal precision, though the lipstick pivot risks undercutting its own severity.
The choice to make the trunk empty and redirect the dread inward—into a private act of self-marking on an empty road—is economical filmmaking that does all its work in a single gesture, turning a two-minute frame into something that breathes.