Nobody Needs to Know
2024 · 9m · United States
Directed by Rachel Rosenstein
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, romance
Tones: darkly comic, humorous, tender
A woman in a promising new relationship learns she has a herpes outbreak and wrestles with guilt and shame over whether to tell her boyfriend.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a comedy about STI disclosure that somehow avoids being either preachy OR a gross-out joke—which means it's probably invisible to most festivals, which is exactly why it deserves to be seen by people willing to bet on a premise that shouldn't work but does.
Rosenstein locates the film in a lineage of intimate comedies about bodily shame and vulnerability, but what distinguishes it is the refusal to resolve into either pathos or punch-line—a tonal restraint that recalls the best of contemporary indie cinema.
The whole thing hinges on one choice: treating the herpes diagnosis as genuinely funny rather than sympathetic, which reframes the whole relationship dynamic and lets you actually believe why disclosure becomes this impossible thing.
Festivals
- Chelsea Film Festival 2025