PERISHER
2017 · 11m · Australia
Directed by Gabriel Francis
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
A dry comedy about Takeshi, a man knocked sideways by unexpected life changes, and the paralysis that sets in when everything that grounds you starts shifting.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's going to call this a quiet indie dramedy, which means most people will sleep through it—but Gabriel Francis is doing something genuinely perverse here, using deadpan comedy as a Trojan horse for real existential dread, and that tonal wrongness is exactly where the film lives.
The film positions itself intelligently within the lineage of Tokyo Story–influenced character studies and Koreeda's school of contemplative comedy, with editing rhythms that trust silence and reaction shots to carry the emotional architecture.
The real move is how Francis lets Takeshi's paralysis breathe through negative space—the film doesn't rush to resolve or explain the paralysis, and that formal patience, plus a performance that finds comedy in pure stasis, transforms what could've been maudlin into something genuinely strange and alive.
Reviews
A musing on one man's evolving reaction to an unexpected period of transition, Cinematographer/Director Gabriel Francis' Victorian College of the Arts grad short Perisher takes a dryly comedic look at those disconcerting feelings of paralysis which can take hold of us during periods of sudden change. Featuring an impressively deadpan central performance from Shingo Usami, Francis reveals how the Japanese actor's ability for subtle expression through body language and atypically muted Australian weather were boons to the production.