For Years to Come
2023 · 27m · USA
Directed by Micah Stuart
Genres: comedy, LGBTQ+, romance
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic, tender
A gay man falls in love with his dead mother's hospice nurse while struggling to reconcile with his elderly father, who is secretly a porn director.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most shorts choose a lane and stay there—this one barrels into tonal whiplash and somehow makes it *work*, yanking you from genuine tenderness into porn-director absurdity without apology. That's the kind of genre-bending subversion that makes consensus critics squirm, which means it's probably the most honest thing in the room.
Stuart navigates a formally treacherous tonal register—balancing parental elegy with irreverent comedy—through precise editorial discipline, each beat earned rather than imposed; the restraint in how the reveal lands suggests a director fluent in both the earnest queer romance tradition and the American indie-comic lineage of tone-shifting.
The film's entire architecture hinges on a single editorial choice: the *timing* of when that porn-director detail enters the scene, and whether it's treated as punchline or as sincere character truth—Stuart commits to the latter, which reframes everything before it and makes the budget-conscious intimacy feel earned rather than slight.
Reviews
Simultaneously serious and funny, absurd and dignified.
A satisfying and honest look at grief, queerness, and the enigmatic nature of kinship.
Festivals
- Outfest Los Angeles LGBTQ+ Film Festival 2023
- HollyShorts Film Festival 2023