It's Not About Fear
2023 · 10m · United Kingdom
Directed by Clément Jochem
Genres: dark comedy, horror, romance
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, tender
Having invited a date over for dinner, James struggles to hide from her the monster that has been haunting him for weeks — until she reveals she has one of her own.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the monster-under-the-bed metaphor to be about shame or trauma, so watching this film just... flip it into mutual acceptance is genuinely disarming—it's subversive not by being weird, but by being tender in a space built for dread.
Jochem orchestrates a careful tonal calibration between body horror and romantic comedy that recalls the formal sophistication of earlier horror-romance hybrids, executed with restraint and a keen eye for the pregnant pause.
The genius move here is the sound design choice—that moment when we *first hear* her monster before seeing it, and the couple's immediate recognition shifts everything from threat to conspiracy—it's a single design decision that transforms the entire emotional architecture.