Life's A Show
2021 · 11m
Directed by Harvey Puttock
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, theatrical
A pandemic-era comedy that turns video calls into a storytelling tool, dipping into the absurdities of performing life through a screen.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most people made pandemic shorts about isolation and sadness; Puttock weaponizes Zoom theater into something genuinely unhinged—treating the grid itself as a stage where performative life and actual life stop being separable, which is the opposite of what we were supposed to learn in 2020.
The formal constraint of the video call frame becomes a contemporary evolution of the theatrical unities, though the execution risks collapsing into sketch comedy rather than sustaining the satirical structure across eleven minutes.
The decision to let the absurdism breathe through the artificiality of the grid—allowing performers to lean into the uncanny flatness of screens rather than fight it—is what separates this from a hundred other Zoom-era comedy shorts doing the same surface observation.
Reviews
Puttock's writing is the film's strongest aspect. The film's humour mostly operates in the characters' lack of self-awareness, although there are stray moments.