Lumps
2026 · 17m · United States
Directed by Maya Winkler
Genres: comedy, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, theatrical
Convinced a lump in her breast is terminal, anxious young Lu decides to spend her remaining days ruining her life, while her best friend refuses to let her do it with dignity.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is a sleeper agent for something weirder — a film that uses hypochondriac dread as permission to blow up the entire social contract between best friends, and somehow lands as both genuinely dark and genuinely funny without winking at the audience.
Winkler's deployment of theatrical absurdism sits in conversation with a lineage of comedies about mortality and denial, but the film's control — its refusal to sentimentalize the friendship at its center — suggests a filmmaker thinking carefully about tone and restraint in service of something more complex than its premise.
The whole thing turns on the decision to let the best friend be the antagonist to Lu's self-destruction rather than her rescuer, and that single structural choice — refusing the expected emotional beat — is what transforms a one-liner into something that actually breathes.
Reviews
In her DN premiering short Lumps, filmmaker Maya Winkler has successfully visualised a certain flavour of absurdity reserved for women navigating medical systems. What follows is a film that understands a universal truth: sometimes the only reasonable response to the question "WTF is DENSE tissue???" is to go completely, gloriously unhinged.