HERLY
2023 · 10m · USA
Directed by Rachel Rambaldi
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
A young woman drags two cult members home to grab a personal item, only to find her brother in the kitchen — and a fractured family wound she wasn't planning to reopen.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A cult pickup as a domestic errand — the genre subversion is doing all the work and I'm into it. Bringing cult bystanders into a sibling reunion is the kind of small, weird choice that earns my attention.
Bujalski-flat kitchen-table cult extraction, with deadpan carrying the entire emotional load. Rambaldi understands that the comedy and the grief are the same gesture.
Cult-extraction errand staged as a suburban kitchen-table drama, played deadpan — that's a tone tightrope and a great one if Rambaldi keeps the deadpan from going slack. The fractured-family wound underneath sells me.
Reviews
Location and tone complement each other nicely and Rambaldi's deadpan performance plays off the dry isolation of the suburban setting.