Honeywell
2024 · 18m · United States
Directed by Jill V. Dae
Genres: dark comedy, drama, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
A woman who has died wakes in a desert afterlife and learns she can compete for a second chance at life. Paired against a selfish loner under the eye of a sarcastic sheriff, she must reckon with the unfinished business of the life she left.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A desert afterlife competition for a second chance at life—complete with a sarcastic sheriff mediator—is exactly the kind of high-concept absurdist premise that makes everyone else nervous and makes me sit up. Dae takes the supernatural redemption machinery seriously enough to hurt, which is why the dark comedy actually lands instead of winking its way out.
The film's tonal architecture—balancing absurdist fantasy scaffolding with genuine reckoning over unfinished business—speaks to a filmmaker aware of how to work within genre convention while pressing against its emotional boundaries. There's a considered formality to how the desert setting becomes both comic stage and confessional space.
The sarcastic sheriff voice is the hinge that unlocks the whole thing; that particular tonal choice transforms what could be a straightforward supernatural drama into something that lets you feel the weight without drowning in it. On an 18-minute runtime and likely modest means, that one characterization decision is doing the heavy lifting that usually requires a much larger apparatus.