Knickknacks
2021 · 10m · USA
Directed by Ryan McGlade
Genres: comedy, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, humorous
An attempted e-commerce transaction goes sideways, dragging two strangers into an escalating, weirdly intimate misunderstanding. The whole thing plays out at the micro-scale of online marketplace small-talk.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Edy Modica and Tynan DeLong negotiating a botched online sale — that's a premise so small and so 2021 it loops back around to being brilliant. Vault it.
McGlade with Modica and DeLong building chamber comedy out of stranger-to-stranger e-commerce etiquette — Carson Mell vignette territory. Micro-stakes done with the right actors land bigger than they should.
Edy Modica and Tynan DeLong doing alt-comedy chamber work around the petty social etiquette of stranger-to-stranger e-commerce — that's a very specific, very small idea executed by exactly the right people. The kind of short where the premise IS the whole joke and that's fine.