Learning to Eat Cake
2025 · 15m · USA
Directed by Juliette Strangio
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, provocative
After a strange and coercive date with a charming old acquaintance, a sparky young woman named Tweety retells the night to her friends as a comical anecdote, while flashbacks reveal the encounter's far more uncomfortable reality. Moving between what happened and the funny story she serves up afterwards, the film examines the grey areas around sex and consent, where leaving is never one big decision but a series of tiny surrenders.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to squirm watching the gap between Tweety's punchlines and what actually happened—which is exactly why the film works, and why most scouts will miss it; Strangio refuses to let comedy or trauma have the last word, and that refusal is the whole point.
The film's formal restraint—the way it lets the juxtaposition of narration and flashback do the argumentative work without editorializing—places it in a lineage of cinema that trusts the viewer to hold contradiction; the editing rhythm between her voice and the images is what makes the grey areas legible.
That moment when Tweety's laugh in the retelling catches just slightly out of sync with her face in the flashback—a micro-choice in sound design—is what transforms this from a concept into something that lives in your body; everything else serves that one decision.
Reviews
For anyone who's been there, it comes with the unpleasant jolt of déjà vu. There's something deeply uncomfortable about watching an experience get turned into a punchline before the person telling it has quite worked out whether she found it funny.
Eventually, she eats the f***ing cake. Not because she wants it, but because at some point it becomes easier to put the thing in your mouth than keep explaining why you don't want it there.