Paisley & Willis
2025 · 12m · USA
Directed by Isaiah Frank
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, LGBTQ+
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, humorous
Two incompetent live-in gardeners, secretly infatuated with their city-council-candidate boss, accidentally derail his political fundraiser and scramble to keep him from finding out.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A queer screwball farce about bumbling gardeners sabotaging a city-council fundraiser is exactly the kind of premise that shouldn't work but does—it's playing three genres at once (horny buddy comedy, slapstick, petty politics) and somehow landing all of them without winking at the audience.
Frank situates this within a lineage of classical screwball structure while allowing the queer desire at its center to breathe without apology; the editing rhythms suggest real consideration of how farce timing differs from conventional comedy beats.
The choice to let the incompetence be genuinely affectionate rather than mean-spirited—that the gardeners fail not through stupidity but through the specific friction of attraction and workplace hierarchy—is the decision that transforms what could be stock into something warm and alive.
Reviews
A NEW FAVORITE SHORT FILM — visually stunning, with impeccable direction.
Impeccable writing and directing by one Isaiah Frank.