Epinephrine
2025 · 10m · USA
Directed by Crosbie Roper, Elizabeth May
A biracial architecture student moonlights as a dancer at a club, and the two lives start dissolving into one another. Dissociation sharpens into a literal dark presence stalking the edges of her frame.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The double-life-as-horror move is overworked, but Roper writes, directs, and stars without a flinch, which earns the swing. The dark presence reads less metaphor than weather.
Roper pushes a sex-work-and-school doubled-life premise into psychological horror with a manifest dark presence — Rose Glass's Saint Maud lineage, Janicza Bravo dissociation. The genre escalation is the formal nerve.
Sex-work-and-school doubled-life premise pushed into psychological horror with a manifest dark presence — Roper directing and starring in a film about her own subject is real personal stakes. Decaying-livestock-on-an-abstract-TV during the 'weigh in on your blackness' dinner is exactly the kind of dissociation-image that earns horror's tools.
Reviews
Roper commits to a vulnerable performance showing much range in a character pulled between two worlds.