It's Not You... It's the Aliens
2024 · 7m · United States
Directed by Taylor Miller
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
A man tells his girlfriend the aliens gave him a message — including the instruction to break up with her.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The premise is delicious precisely because it's a cop-out dressed as cosmic absurdism — the aliens are just a convenient scapegoat for something he wanted to do anyway, which makes the whole thing funnier and meaner than any straight breakup comedy has the spine to be.
It's operating in a lineage of speculative relationship dramedy that traces back through Kaufman and the Coen Brothers, using genre scaffolding (aliens, sci-fi messaging) to interrogate sincerity and blame with genuine formal care.
The film's entire weight rests on a single tonal pivot — the moment where we realize the aliens might be real or might be a story he's telling himself — and Miller threads that needle with a performance choice that makes both interpretations devastatingly plausible.
Reviews
This witty, inventive short dramedy blends sci-fi absurdity with painfully recognizable emotional truth. Beneath the humor lies a sharp observation about how people will tell themselves any story to avoid painful emotion, and how telling a hurtful but real truth will destabilize the comfortable rut they've taken refuge from life within.