How to Re-Caulk your Tub
2021 · 10m · USA
Directed by Sean Pierce
Genres: comedy, drama, experimental
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, melancholic
What starts as a deadpan home-improvement tutorial about re-caulking a bathtub slowly mutates into a quiet panic about aging, anxiety, and the slow leak of selfhood. The grout never quite sets.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A tutorial that ends in dread — yes please. The bathroom as existential theater is a genre I want more of, not less.
Pierce hijacks the YouTube-tutorial format as Trojan horse for existential dread — Jeanne Dielman by way of How To with John Wilson, anchored by Moorman's increasingly leaky performance. The form-as-rot gambit is exactly right.
YouTube-tutorial format as Trojan horse for existential dread — the grout-never-quite-sets metaphor is doing real work, and Moorman's increasingly leaky performance is the load-bearing element. 'No one survives' as a flash of inner monologue mid-caulk is exactly the right kind of escalation.
Reviews
A clever and affecting mashup, featuring the committed performance of Moorman.