Laurence Fishburne in Space
2021 · 3m
Directed by Josefin Malmen, David Strindberg
Genres: comedy, experimental, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
An homage to a man who keeps his cool in hellish situations beyond the known universe, told through a home shopping presenter's sales pitch practice.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Taking Laurence Fishburne's entire archetype—the unflappable sage in catastrophe—and filtering it through a home shopping presenter's rehearsal is exactly the kind of absurdist conceptual inversion that shouldn't work but does; it's the sort of weird premise that makes you immediately want to see what they did with it.
The film's formal restraint—anchoring cosmic absurdism within the mundane rhetoric of infomercial language—demonstrates a considered approach to genre deconstruction, situating itself in a lineage of found-form experimentation that rewards close attention to its tonal architecture.
The pivot from the presenter's practiced sales cadence to genuine cosmic dread, a shift that lives entirely in vocal register and delivery, is the single choice that transforms what could've been a one-note sketch into something genuinely unsettling on a three-minute budget.
Reviews
An homage to a man who keeps his cool even in hellish situations beyond our known universe, told through a home shopping presenter's semi-passionate sales pitch practice.