Keep Out
2026 · 9m
Directed by Mark Mohn
Tones: darkly comic, tense
A door-to-door saleswoman refuses to leave the home of Tyler, a hostile loner who lives alone with his daytime television and a severe Keep Out sign. Their tense, comic back-and-forth escalates until a startling trick finally reveals itself.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Door-to-door saleswoman vs. hostile loner *should* be boilerplate sitcom friction, but Mohn's willing to let it curdle into something genuinely unsettling—the 'trick' is the kind of narrative swerve that makes you retroactively suspicious of every exchange before it.
A cleanly constructed two-hander that respects the tradition of comedic escalation while maintaining enough formal control to earn its tonal shift; the restraint in staging and editing keeps the artifice from collapsing into gimmick.
The entire short hinges on one choice—whether to play the salesman's persistence as naive optimism or calculated performance—and Mohn's decision to keep that ambiguous until the reveal does more narrative work with 9 minutes and two actors than most shorts manage with half the constraint.
Reviews
And thus begins a back and forth that is by turns tense and comic. And when the trick finally reveals itself, it really will be startling.