Junior Associate
2024 · 10m · USA
Directed by Joe Gleason
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
A junior corporate drone accidentally swaps suitcases with a stranger at a New York baggage carousel, and his career, life, and sanity start coming unglued. The comedy lives in how aggressively the film refuses the action-movie formula it's nominally borrowing.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The swap-suitcase plot is a fossil. Gleason picks it up specifically to refuse its beats — which is more interesting to me than a hundred films obeying their genre rules.
Gleason builds a bag-swap thriller that deflates every action beat — After Hours corporate paranoia retooled with Carmichael's formula-deviation instincts. The genre-as-negative-space is the comic engine.
Suitcase-swap thriller setup that intentionally deflates every action beat — mining laughs from where the genre cliche would be is harder than it sounds, and Home Planet's Gleason-Forrest pairing has the discipline to deflate consistently. The 'Stevenson documents' / 'merger' specificity is good corporate-paranoia texture.
Reviews
Situating its comedy within a straightforward action premise, the film gets a lot of mileage from deviating away from the formula.