One Way Single
2013 · 6m · United States
Directed by Andrew Mitrak
Genres: dark comedy, thriller
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
Saul spots a devilishly cute girl named Pepper eyeing him on a midnight train and makes his move — but Pepper is too busy fantasizing about the brutal death he would die if the train derailed.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Here's a film that understands the joke nobody else is telling: that romantic pursuit and catastrophic fantasy live in the same six minutes without irony or apology. Mitrak commits to the absurd premise so completely that it becomes genuinely subversive — a dark comedy that refuses the safety of winking at the audience.
The film's structural sophistication lies in its parallel-cut architecture, where mundane seduction and elaborate disaster play against each other with the precision of a formal conceit; it's formally aware of its own contradiction in ways that recall experimental comedy's best traditions.
The entire film hinges on one choice — that Pepper's internal monologue of train-crash gore plays not as disturbing interruption but as deadpan equal weight to Saul's flirtation — and that tonal commitment on a six-minute budget is what makes it work.