Everyone Does It
2025 · 10m · UK
Directed by Craig Ainsley
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, humorous
A man wakes after a one-night stand to overhear his female companion and her friends having a baffling conversation — they're casual time tourists from the future visiting the pre-AI era, and they've just broken their one golden rule about not messing with timelines.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—someone who gets that the most subversive move isn't adding stakes to time travel, it's draining them entirely, turning your sci-fi MacGuffin into a Groupon experience. The fact that this lands the joke *entirely* through overheard dialogue, asking nothing of the protagonist but awkward semi-consciousness, is the kind of premise inversion that makes other scouts twitch.
Ainsley's structural restraint—keeping us locked in fragmentary eavesdropping rather than expanding into exposition or spectacle—recalls the constraint-based comedies of Koreeda and early Reichardt, a formal discipline that transforms what could've been a SNL sketch into something with genuine compositional rigor.
The masterstroke is the decision to never let the camera leave the man's point of view: every revelation about casual timeline tourism lands as pure informational debris, which means the entire film's comedy and pathos hinges on how Ainsley frames a protagonist hearing his own insignificance in real time—that asymmetry does all the work.
Reviews
Takes a high-concept sci-fi premise and grounds it in the mundane, messy reality of human interaction.
Ainsley wanted to create something in that genre that was really grounded and colloquial — to make the whole thing feel real, we wanted it to be chaotic.