Gone Fishin'
2025 · 10m · USA
Directed by Eli Speigel
Genres: drama, experimental, mystery
Tones: dark, melancholic, surreal
A man buys flowers to hide a gun, stumbles on a dead acquaintance whose suicide note simply reads GONE FISHIN', and drifts through the aftermath in a fog of total dissociation.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A suicide note that just says GONE FISHIN' is the kind of black-comic gut-punch most films wouldn't have the nerve to leave dry. Speigel doesn't moralize, doesn't explain — that's the whole appeal.
Speigel refuses to dramatize a corpse — emotional vacancy weaponized, the protagonist's flatline affect as the form. Hal Hartley and Kaurismaki lineage; the dissociation is the thesis.
Flatline affect as the protagonist navigates buying flowers to hide a gun and then finds a corpse with a 'GONE FISHIN' note taped to its back — refusing to dramatize a corpse is the entire formal bet, and that takes nerve. Ethereal score filling the gaps is the right musical answer.
Reviews
captures an uncanny, dream-like logic to hypnotic effect