Man Baby
2026 · 9m
Directed by Aaron Murtagh
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, provocative, surreal
A man named Bert begins regressing into uncomfortable, infantile dependency.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A man collapsing into literal infancy is exactly the kind of premise that makes committees squirm—it's gross, it's conceptually audacious, and it refuses the safety of metaphor. Murtagh's betting everything on discomfort as narrative engine, and that's the move.
The surrealist tone sits uneasily between Buñuel and contemporary body horror, which is interesting formally but leaves the film caught between traditions rather than inhabiting one with full conviction. The regression arc has philosophical weight if the filmmaking can sustain the register.
There's a single performance choice—the moment when Bert's agency visibly fragments—that either makes this work or doesn't; everything hinges on that calibration between pathos and grotesque, and that's the kind of micro-decision that separates a sketch from a film.
Reviews
MAN BABY is a short film about regression, dependency, and the uncomfortable territory between who we are and what we're becoming.