Have a Safe Trip
2025 · 11m
Directed by Liz Wiest
Genres: comedy, romance, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, tender, whimsical
An acid-coloured, psychedelic eleven-minute rom-com about Carl and Michelle, two people navigating the vulnerability of wanting to be liked on a first date.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a rom-com wrapped in acid-trip visuals, which sounds like the kind of ironic postmodern gesture that would bore me—but Wiest commits to the psychedelia as genuine emotional language, not costume, which is harder and stranger than it pretends to be.
A whimsical surrealist romance that understands its lineage in experimental comedy and absurdist character work, though the visual excess occasionally overwhelms the formal precision that could elevate it from charming to genuinely rigorous.
The acid-colour palette could've been hollow stylistic noise, but Wiest uses it to externalize nervous vulnerability—every color shift maps onto emotional exposure—which turns a first-date premise into something that actually *moves* because of that single production choice.
Reviews
An acid coloured, 11-minute rom-com that uses the fun of psychedelics to poke at the vulnerability of wanting to be liked, it zooms through space, time, and some philosophy, to arrive at our ability and responsibility to take care of each other. The editing is ticklingly funny and the music groovy.