Living Reality
2025 · 10m · USA
Directed by Philip Thompson
Genres: drama, experimental, satire
Tones: dark, darkly comic, surreal
A fake 1990s sitcom keeps cutting away to something much darker at home, while one character develops symptoms the laugh track refuses to acknowledge. An autopsy of the form, performed live.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Sitcom-pastiche shorts are usually a one-joke prison. This one uses the laugh track to make you feel insane, which is the only correct reason to revive the format.
Thompson uses sitcom pastiche as Trojan horse for genuine dread — medium and message at war on the same set, WandaVision if Todd Haynes shot it on real videotape. The form-as-illness gambit is exactly my register.
Sitcom pastiche as a Trojan horse for genuine dread where Theo's coughing and longing get ignored by the laugh-track — the medium-as-message war is exactly the right autopsy. WandaVision-via-Haynes-on-actual-tape is the dream pitch and Thompson directing-and-starring matches the meta seriousness.
Reviews
Thompson goes further by subverting the medium, as he did with his previous short, 'I'm at Home,' which we featured in 2023.