Irritable Bowel
10m · USA
Directed by Joseph Agredano
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, humorous
Mid-date, a man's guts stage a coup and route him into a bathroom where he stumbles into an unplanned connection with a stranger. He ditches the girlfriend to chase the encounter, and the night turns on a dime.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A title that promises nothing and a premise that delivers exactly that — gross, true, weirdly tender. Most date-night shorts wish they had this much nerve.
A meet-cute engineered entirely by gastrointestinal catastrophe is a real visual-and-spatial setup, but the comedy-of-bathroom-romance has a hard time avoiding gag-piece territory.
A meet-cute happening through a stall door — a romantic detour engineered entirely by gastrointestinal catastrophe. That bodily-disaster-as-narrative-engine is exactly the Safdie register that earns the comparison.
Reviews
The shift in tone is upheld by the film's three actors and their commitment to the peculiar situation.