KILLJOY

The scouts

A restraining order at a party sounds like sitcom setup until it absolutely isn't—Fisher flips the domestic-thriller script by making the absent threat more potent than any jump scare, and lets the surrealism creep in through social performance rather than ghosts. It's nasty, weird, and does the opposite of what you expect it to do.

Fisher positions this within the lineage of ensemble paranoia films—think Carpenter's social unease rather than spectacle—and executes with restraint, letting the tonal shift from celebration to dread accumulate through behavioral shifts rather than plot machinery. The editing honors the unsettling spaces between reactions.

The entire film hinges on one choice: making the friends' strangeness microexpressions and vocal hesitations rather than overt possession or villainy, which turns a 13-minute runtime into something that feels claustrophobic without a budget for effects. That single commitment to behavioral horror over narrative explanation is what makes it stick.