Heroic Dose
2025 · 14m · USA
Directed by Dugan Gundelfinger
Genres: comedy, documentary, experimental
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A filmmaker at a dinner party recounts the night a mysterious sorceress in Costa Rica led him on a heroic-dose LSD journey — except his best friend and co-writer was there too and remembers it completely differently. The film cuts between both versions using live-action, sock puppets, VFX, and rotoscope animation.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A man literally commissioned sock puppets to depict his own psychedelic enlightenment while his best friend insists he spent the night face-down in the sand — this is the only correct way to make a spiritual journey film.
Gundelfinger stages the same LSD trip in radically contradictory mixed media — sock puppets alongside Jena Malone — using unreliable narration as comedic structure. EEAAO-adjacent without the bloat.
Staging the same LSD trip in radically contradictory media — sock puppets alongside Jena Malone, rotoscope versus live action — turns unreliable narration into a genuine structural joke about psychedelic memory. Comedic genre-bending shorts rarely commit this hard to the bit; this one might.
Reviews
Hilarious and will definitely have you laughing out loud many times.
Festivals
- Glasgow Short Film Festival 2025