Kiddo
2022 · 13m
Directed by Brett Chapman
Genres: dark comedy, horror, thriller
An older woman named Kiddo rides a rickety bus with a group of exuberant teenagers toward a theme park called Wonderland, but the journey exposes sinister secrets about their hosts.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A rickety bus to a theme park called Wonderland that's actually a nightmare machine—it's the kind of premise that sounds like a pitch meeting joke until you realize Chapman's committed to the bit entirely, and that commitment to the absurd is what makes the sinister stuff land.
Chapman demonstrates formal control in how the film weaponizes the cheerfulness of the teenagers against mounting dread, situating itself in a lineage of body horror and folk-horror that values tone modulation and compositional precision.
The sound design choice of keeping the bus engine's mechanical grinding audible throughout transforms what could've been a generic thriller into something claustrophobic and specific—it's one decision that makes you feel trapped in a way the plot alone wouldn't achieve.