Gregory Go Boom
2013 · 18m · USA
Directed by Janicza Bravo
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: dark, darkly comic, melancholic
A paraplegic young man named Gregory leaves home and tries dating for the first time, only to discover that romantic reality is far stranger and crueler than he'd imagined. What begins as awkward comedy curdles into something far darker.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Bravo weaponizes Michael Cera's squeaky-clean brand against itself—what starts as cringe-comedy scaffolding collapses into genuine predatory menace, and the film doesn't flinch or wink its way out of the discomfort. It's the kind of tonal ambush that makes consensus viewers squirm, which is exactly the point.
Bravo's control of register—the way she lets comedy evaporate into something vertiginous and uncomfortable—positions this within a lineage of formally rigorous dark comedies that understand how tone is structure; the editing rhythm itself becomes complicit in the unsettling shift from funny to frightening.
The entire film hinges on Cera's refusal to stay cute—one performance choice, sustained across 18 minutes, that transforms a YouTube comedy premise into something that actually *earns* its darkness rather than performing it.
Reviews
Cera plays Gregory as a kind of Napoleon Dynamite crossed with Yertle the Turtle — a hapless dreamer whose collisions with the world tip the film from comedy into something sadder and stranger.
An interestingly dark and ominous short that will make you view Michael Cera completely differently.
Festivals
- Sundance Film Festival 2014, Short Film Jury Award: U.S. Fiction