Little Brother
2021 · 13m
Directed by Dikega Hadnot
Genres: dark comedy, thriller
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tense
A teacher investigating his gifted student's absences shares sweet tea with the boy's grandmother, unaware of the special ingredient and the lesson in store.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A teacher walks into what looks like a wellness drama and stumbles into a poisoning—the premise is deliciously perverse, playing earnest mentorship against the grandmother's quiet malevolence with the kind of tonal whiplash that makes consensus critics nervous. Hadnot commits to the bit without winking, which is exactly why it lands.
The film's architecture depends on misdirection and tonal control—markers of a director thinking carefully about viewer expectation and narrative structure—though the dark comedy register occasionally strains against the thriller framework it inhabits.
The entire film turns on the choice to keep the grandmother's motivations opaque and her warmth genuine; that refusal to make her a cartoon villain, to let the sweet tea scene play with real affection before the reveal, is what transforms a gimmick into something unsettling.