Plastic
2013 · 7m · Australia
Directed by Sandy Widyanata
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy, romance
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, whimsical
While Anna prepares for a first date with Henry, the man she has secretly loved for years, everything goes wrong until she discovers she can sculpt her appearance at will as if her body were clay.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A shapeshifting body-horror romance sounds like it should be a mess of competing tones, but Widyanata commits so fully to the surreal logic that it becomes genuinely disorienting—the kind of film that makes you forget what "normal" romantic comedy beats are supposed to feel like.
The film sits in a lineage of body-transformation cinema that traces back through Lynch and Cronenberg, but its use of tactile, clay-like plasticity as both visual metaphor and narrative device feels more formally considered than that inheritance alone would suggest.
The crucial choice here is sound design and editing rhythm in the transformation sequences—those moments of plastic squelching and spatial distortion aren't gratuitous, they *are* the emotional register of the entire piece, turning one actor's willingness to be physically vulnerable into something that justifies a seven-minute runtime.