Goose
2025 · 8m · United States
Directed by Ethan Edwards
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, tense, theatrical
Two old college friends meet in a bar where a debut novel that hits far too close to home turns a civil reunion into a razor-sharp duel of secrets.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a two-hander verbal sparring match in a bar—the premise sounds like every indie drama ever, until you realize the whole thing is a carefully rigged trap disguised as nostalgia, and by the end you're not sure who won or if winning even matters.
The theatrical precision here is surgical: two actors, one room, a published novel as the ticking bomb—this is economy of form deployed with real intelligence, the kind of construction that sits comfortably in a lineage from Mamet to contemporary chamber drama, where every line does double duty.
The entire film pivots on the moment one character realizes the book isn't metaphorical—it's the specific editing choice of *when* that recognition lands on their face that transforms a polished two-hander into something that actually stings.
Reviews
What begins as a tense but civil exchange escalates into a deliciously barbed duel, where every line carries the weight of buried resentment and the absurdity of seeing oneself refracted through someone else's fiction. Goose is a whip-smart exploration of authorship, memory, and the uncomfortable truths we'd rather leave buried and not weaponized by supposed friends.