Neon Banana
2024 · 8m
Directed by Samuel-Ali Mirpoorian
Genres: coming-of-age, crime, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
A teenager's flirtatious Snapchat exchange turns to sextortion when the woman demands money under threat of leaking his photos. Too ashamed to ask for help, he discovers the scam runs deeper than he imagined.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's making sextortion thrillers now, but Mirpoorian refuses the easy exploitation angle—instead he's hunting for the shame architecture underneath, which is genuinely unsettling in ways most films about this don't bother attempting.
The film arrives in a moment saturated with true-crime material, yet its formal restraint—the careful withholding of certain images, the editing rhythms that mirror psychological dissociation—positions it thoughtfully within a lineage of intimate psychological thrillers rather than tabloid sensationalism.
The revelation that the scam network extends beyond the initial threat is orchestrated through a single sound design choice—a shift in what we hear versus what we see—that recontextualizes everything before it and proves Mirpoorian understands how to build dread on a minimal budget.