Kiddo
2022 · 11m · USA
Directed by Paul Taylor
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
An expectant couple's parenting skills are put to the test when a hungry stranger arrives unannounced at their door. What begins as a tense domestic confrontation slips sideways into an absurdist meditation on impending parenthood.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Taking the cosmic dread of parenthood and literalizing it as a home invasion is exactly the kind of absurdist sleight-of-hand that makes people uncomfortable—which means it's working. Taylor doesn't blink at the premise; he commits to the whiplash, and that refusal to wink at the audience is what makes it subversive instead of cute.
The rapid-fire editing and discontinuous mise-en-scène place this squarely in a lineage of formally playful domestic comedies (think Kaufman), though the execution here feels uncertain—the tonal architecture doesn't quite hold, and the visual language strains to sustain its own ambition across eleven minutes.
The genius move is using the intruder's hunger as a literal, recurring prop rather than a metaphor—it keeps the abstraction grounded in physical need, and that single commitment to treating the symbolic as mundane is what prevents this from collapsing into pure concept.
Reviews
Walks a very challenging line between playing things straight, and locating and gently pushing the comedy within its limited physical and limitless metaphysical parameters.
An eleven-minute distillation that epitomizes the emotional whirlwind of changes that come with expecting a child.
Festivals
- Sarasota Film Festival 2022
- Tallgrass Film Festival 2022, Outstanding Screenplay