Luckie Strike
2017 · 3m · New Zealand
Directed by Melissa Nickerson
Genres: adventure, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tense
Caving friends Mike and Dave squeeze through mud and darkness hunting a new entrance to a spectacular cave system.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's positioned as adventure-doc comfort food, but honestly the tension sells itself—two guys literally squeezing through suffocating mud for an unknown payoff is inherently weird enough that Nickerson doesn't need to punch it up, and that restraint is almost perverse.
The contemplative register here—the patience with darkness and silence—positions this in a lineage of structured documentary that trusts geology and embodied risk as narrative, recalling the formal rigor of climbing docs that understand landscape as character.
The sound design of compressed breathing and dripping water in a three-minute frame does the work that most shorts need ten minutes and a score to accomplish; Nickerson's choice to let the cave's own claustrophobia narrate is what makes this transcend expedition footage into something genuinely unsettling.