F*** the Honeymoon
2021 · 12m · UK
Directed by Joshua Thornton-Allan
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, humorous
Lizzie agrees to an 'alternative' first date with Nathan, only to discover he has brought her to a couples counseling session — forcing her to play the part of a girlfriend in front of a therapist who assumes they are already a couple.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most people would've made this a cutesy rom-com about two people bonding over a dating mishap—Thornton-Allan instead weaponizes the premise into something genuinely perverse, forcing both characters into performative intimacy with a therapist as unwitting accomplice. It's the kind of conceptual inversion that feels obvious in hindsight but requires the specific kind of subversive thinking that most shorts are too polite to attempt.
The film's structural debt to absurdist comedy and embarrassment humor feels rooted in a lineage stretching back through Nathan Fielding's performance work and the cringe-comedy traditions of the 2010s, but what grounds it is the careful choreography of social contract violation—each exchange with the therapist precisely calibrated for maximum discomfort.
The real lift here is the casting choice to let both leads play genuine uncertainty rather than knowing complicity; that decision—to keep their confusion unfaked and their discomfort real—transforms what could've been a contrived premise into something that actually *costs* them to perform, and you see that cost in every stuttered response.
Festivals
- Indie Shorts Awards Cannes 2021
- Manchester International Film Festival 2022
- LA Comedy Festival 2022
- Flickers' Rhode Island International Film Festival 2022
- San Diego International Film Festival 2022
- Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2022
- London Film Week 2022