Journal
2021 · 10m · USA
Directed by Alex Bliss
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
Two friends hunt for a missing bag after a long night out, but their stories about what actually happened start drifting apart. The mundane premise gets cranked into anxious, paranoid territory.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Lost-property stories usually bore me senseless. Bliss weaponizes the errand into a referendum on what these two friends won't say out loud, and that's a trick worth watching.
Bliss turns a lost-bag errand into a Joanna Hogg friendship-choreography exercise with Safdies-lite anxiety — diverging accounts as the form of intimacy. Quiet, exact.
A lost-bag errand cranked into anxious territory through quietly contradictory accounts — that's a hard tonal target and the sharp-editing/visceral-imagery descriptors at least tell me Bliss is thinking about how to render the divergence. Two-hander hidden-feelings work depends entirely on the actors.
Reviews
Takes what should be a mundane scenario and pumps it full of anxiety and paranoia, placing richly drawn characters on the edge of hidden feelings and complex repression.