Improv is Love
2018 · 10m · USA
Directed by Doron Max Hagay
Genres: comedy, dark comedy
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic
A guy skips visiting his hospitalized father to compete in a local improv tournament. The premise is the punchline and the indictment.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Improv is the only art form where bystanders are the victims, and finally a film admits it. Hagay swings at the entire UCB ecosystem and lands clean.
Hagay treats improv with religious-calling seriousness and lets that be the joke — Gethard-style earnest sadness meets a Hertzfeldt diagnosis. The premise is the indictment.
A guy skipping his hospitalized father's bedside to compete in a 'cage match' improv tournament — Hagay treating improv with the seriousness of a religious calling and letting that be the joke is exact comic calibration. The earnest stammered phone-call delivery is the load-bearing performance.
Reviews
A scathing but hilarious critique on comedians, artists, anyone, with their priorities in wild disarray.