Lean In
2023 · 15m · Australia
Directed by Lucy Coleman
A broke, dejected feminist comedian is taken out for corporate drinks with her brother's sales-bro colleagues, where financial desperation tempts her to abandon her principles and become the very thing she swore she'd never be.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Cringe-comedy about a feminist comedian selling out to sales-bro money — Fleabag at a corporate drinks night, fine, but Australian shorts about this exact tension are practically their own genre now. Watchable but expected.
The cringe-comedy seduction-of-integrity register is unmistakably Fleabag-adjacent, and the Australian sales-bro milieu gives it a specific cultural sting. Whether it transcends the recognizable beats of Promising Young Woman territory will depend on execution that the summary cannot promise.
Structuring the moral collapse as a seduction scene — where the integrity is the thing being undressed — is a sharp premise, though page summary is thin on craft specifics. Australian cringe-comedy on this terrain lives or dies on the lead performance, which I can't fully verify from metadata.
Reviews
A snappy and captivating exploration of what it means to be a woman in a man's world, with rapid-fire, scornfully witty dialogue that makes you question your integrity and dares you not to be complacent in a system rigged against you.
This isn't a satisfying tale of female empowerment. But a dirty one.
Festivals
- BFI London Film Festival 2025
- Flickerfest 2024, Best Comedy Short Film
- St Kilda Film Festival 2024, Best Actress
- Venezia Short Film Festival 2024, Best Actress, Best Screenplay