Higher Grounds
2023 · 17m
Directed by Joe Kramer
Genres: comedy, romance, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
On the fateful day intelligent life arrives to destroy Earth, a slacker alien gets sidetracked when he’s smitten with a bitter barista — and humanity’s survival depends on whether he can get her number before his partner blows us sky high.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a film that understands the absurd logistics of apocalypse, where the end of the world becomes a footnote to a meet-cute. Kramer's doing the thing that actually matters: making you genuinely unsure whether to root for the alien or humanity's extinction.
The premise sits uncomfortably between rom-com and sci-fi disaster, and while the tonal mixing shows ambition, the film doesn't quite earn the formal control needed to justify its genre-straddling—it wants to have it both ways without committing fully to either tradition.
There's a specific moment where the barista's performance—that micro-shift from indifference to something else—becomes the hinge the entire film turns on, and Kramer finds it, lets it breathe, and doesn't oversell it; that's the decision that makes the whole premise land.
Reviews
Filmemacher Joe Kramer liefert mit „Higher Grounds“ einen unterhaltsamen Kurzfilm, der ein bisschen wie „Independence Day“ ist, nur halt in absurd-lustig statt explosiv-spannend. „On the fateful day intelligent life arrives to destroy Earth, a slacker alien gets sidetracked when he’s smitten with a