Joan Tittles
2022 · 2m
Genres: comedy, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A lonely man flipping channels finds Joan, an offbeat, overly enthusiastic aerobics instructor whose strange motivation takes a weird and twisted turn.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A two-minute bit where the punchline is that an aerobics instructor's enthusiasm masks something genuinely unhinged—this is the kind of premise that should be terrible but somehow lands because it refuses to wink at you. Most scouts would pass on something this schlocky; Felix picks it specifically because it commits to the bit in a way that feels genuinely dangerous.
The absurdist tone sits uneasily between sketch comedy and psychological horror, lacking the formal rigor that would elevate this beyond a viral video; the editing feels reactive rather than purposeful, and there's no clear lineage being engaged here beyond surface-level dark comedy.
The entire thing hinges on the actress's commitment to the character's affect—that sustained, almost aggressive cheerfulness that never breaks even as the "twist" lands—and the fact that two minutes can build and detonate that kind of tonal dissonance on performance alone is the real filmmaking move here.