I Hope He Doesn't Kill Me
2024 · 12m · UK
Directed by Lyndon Henley Hanrahan, Nora Dahle Borchgrevink
Genres: dark comedy, horror, LGBTQ+
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
Buzz waits outside the apartment building of his anonymous Grindr hookup, anxiously imagining all the depraved ways the night could end. Horrified yet horny, he buzzes the buzzer anyway.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a film that turns the most unbearable internal monologue of queer dating into something genuinely *weird* rather than earnest or pitying. The horror-comedy spiral they've externalized could've been maudlin dreck; instead it's subversive enough to make you laugh at the exact moment you're supposed to squirm.
The film situates itself intelligently within a lineage of body-horror and romantic anxiety cinema, though the tonal oscillation between mundane realism and campy nightmare feels more formally restless than resolved—a promising formal problem that the editing doesn't quite clinch.
The decision to literalize his spiraling thoughts as a parallel semi-horror sequence rather than voiceover is the hinge that works; that single structural choice elevates what could've been a straightforward character study into something with real textural rhythm and visual wit.
Reviews
A campy and queer black comedy, a bit naughty but made to make people laugh.
Patchy but amusing — likeable actor-writer-co-director Hanrahan throws a lot of ideas at the screen with varying degrees of success.
Festivals
- Iris Prize LGBTQ+ Film Festival 2024, OFN Best Fluid Story Award
- Out On Film 2024