Moth Music
2022 · 15m · USA
Directed by Ciaran Davis-McGregor
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tense
A recently unemployed fast food worker named Derrick seeks justice by joining a self-help group led by a guru named Andre, where he's tasked with humiliating a fellow member with chronic bad breath until the dynamic reverses on him.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Repulsion as a craft principle. Fast food guy joins a self-help cult, gets told to humiliate the bad-breath guy, and the camera refuses to flinch. Hideously good.
Ciaran Davis-McGregor's repulsion-and-self-help register is in the Lars von Trier / Ruben Östlund vein of male-grotesque study; the genre is overcrowded but the descriptor sounds disciplined.
A self-help cult assignment built around halitosis-based humiliation, shot on 16mm with 'wafts of pitch black humor' — Magnolia-lineage cult dynamics scaled down to bad-breath group therapy is a uniquely cruel premise.