Fry Day
2017 · 16m · United States
Directed by Laura Moss
Genres: coming-of-age, crime, drama
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
On the eve of Ted Bundy's execution, a teenage girl sells souvenir Polaroids to the crowds gathered outside the Florida prison, drifting into danger after dark.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone wants to make Bundy feel iconic or monstrous—Moss does neither, just lets a kid hustle outside the prison like it's a county fair, which is somehow more unsettling than any true-crime genuflection could be.
The film's restraint recalls a lineage of American indie cinema that trusts atmosphere over exposition; the composition of teenage entrepreneurship against state violence reads as deliberate formal commentary, pitched somewhere between Gus Van Sant and the Safdie brothers' early work.
That decision to frame the souvenir selling as mundane entrepreneurship rather than spectacle—just a kid finding her angle in a crowd—reorients the entire moral weight of the story and does it on what must be a minimal budget.
Reviews
That Fry Day uses the disquieting atmospherics and moral turbulence of the serial killer genre without indulging in gratuitous physical violence is a testament to Moss's extraordinary directorial skill. By referencing this historical event and then subverting the narrative Moss has made something completely original that hits much deeper-than-expected notes.