Graham Greene: I'm Just Me
2025 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Tara Johns
Genres: biography, comedy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, theatrical
A struggling actor wearing a literal wolf's head seeks help from a five-star fox-headed psychiatrist who keeps answering ringing phones in the office. The surreal session spirals until the fox mask slips to reveal actor Graham Greene.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A wolf-headed actor in a fox psychiatrist's office—most people would've punted this as precious nonsense, but Johns commits so hard to the absurdist logic that it becomes a genuinely unhinged meditation on performance and identity, culminating in the mask slip that recontextualizes the whole thing as autobiography disguised as surrealism.
The theatrical vocabulary here is deliberate and controlled—the phone interruptions function as a formally rigorous destabilization of the confessional form—but the film's true debt is to a lineage of mask-based performance art and Brechtian alienation that feels somewhat underexamined for what could have been a more formally innovative piece.
The choice to keep both characters masked through the entire psychiatric session—maintaining the artificiality even as vulnerability should be increasing—is the decision that justifies the whole concept, and the economy of a 4-minute runtime forces that constraint to do all the heavy lifting of meaning.