Ear Ache
2016 · 15m · USA
Directed by Alex Kavutskiy
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, tense
A struggling actor with a chronic ear infection takes his pain out on everyone around him, his physical suffering becoming permission for all the low-grade cruelty he's been suppressing. A dark comedy built on a potent, on-the-edge performance from DeMorge Brown.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
An ear infection as the inciting incident for a full psychological portrait of a miserable man. The smallness of the complaint is the whole joke and the whole tragedy.
Alex Kavutskiy's struggling-actor-with-ear-infection-as-rage-vehicle is a perfect on-the-edge performance vehicle in the Safdie-brothers register — uncomfortably engrossing is the right adjective.
The ear infection is a completely mundane ailment which makes it a deliberately absurd engine for genuine psychological portrait — Uncut-Gems-anxiety without the cash, carried by a potent on-the-edge DeMorge Brown performance.