Grand Zero
2015 · 15m · USA
Directed by Kevin Oeser
Tones: darkly comic, tense
A family man returns to his hometown to settle his parents' estate, only to discover he is the last person in town not enrolled in an all-consuming pyramid scheme.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Pyramid scheme as cult-horror with Brian Huskey and Thomas Lennon — that's UCB satire with actual structural wit, not just smirking. I'll lean forward for this one.
The escalating-dread-of-pyramid-scheme premise with Brian Huskey and Thomas Lennon is a UCB lineage played with horror-genre patience, and Oeser's 'It's not a cult. It's America.' tagline frames the satire with precision. A reliable American dark-comic register.
Brian Huskey and Thomas Lennon doing UCB-style escalation in a 14-minute pyramid-scheme dread piece is exactly the kind of comic-thriller register where pacing has to be surgical. The hashtags (#ucb, #pyramid scheme) suggest a specific improv-trained sensibility.