Ingredients
2020 · 23m
Directed by Hannah Michielsen
Tones: absurdist, contemplative
A blocked Toronto writer measures himself against his smoother, more successful roommate. When the roommate's cousin, another writer in crisis, comes to stay, the two struggling men connect in ways that blur fact and fiction.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be a roommate comedy about creative jealousy, but Michielsen keeps slipping fact and fiction into each other like she's not sure which one matters—which is exactly the move that makes it work, even if nobody else would have the guts to leave it that ambiguous.
A cleanly observed character study that inherits from the literary fiction tradition of creative anxiety, though the tonal shifts between comedy and something stranger keep it from quite achieving the formal coherence that would cement its place in the lineage.
The entire film pivots on a single choice—the decision to let the two writers' conversations blur into performance, to stop clarifying when someone's performing their neurosis versus living it—and suddenly a modest premise about roommate dynamics becomes something genuinely unsettling.