MIDNIGHT INK
2020 · 16m · United States
Directed by John Chiodi
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, surrealism
Tones: melancholic, surreal, whimsical
Two kids ditch a funeral to get a tattoo; the further from home they get, the more surreal things become.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A funeral-ditching premise that refuses to stay grounded—the surrealism doesn't announce itself, it just *happens*, which is exactly how subversion should work. Most scouts see coming-of-age and check the box; this one uses that genre as a Trojan horse for something genuinely uncanny.
Chiodi demonstrates compositional control in how the everyday (funeral, tattoo parlor) fragments into the dreamlike without losing narrative coherence; there's a lineage here—perhaps Kaufman, certainly the American indie surrealists—but the film earns its tonal shifts through sustained formal choices rather than whimsy.
The decision to keep the kids' performances grounded and naturalistic while the world warps around them is what makes this work; that tonal tension—their deadpan confusion against increasingly fractured reality—transforms a modest budget into something that feels genuinely disorienting.