POACHERS
2025 · 7m · United States
Directed by Darrell Jackson Shelton
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, tense
A family Easter-egg hunt turns disastrous when the reading of the patriarch's will sends the hunt spiraling into a scramble for the estate.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Takes the saccharine Easter-egg hunt—basically a dead genre—and weaponizes it against bourgeois family mythmaking; the will-reading ambush is audacious enough to make you squirm, which means it's working exactly as intended.
The tonal whiplash from children's holiday spectacle to estate-thriller has obvious precedent in Altman and the Coens, but Shelton hasn't quite earned the formal control to make the register-shift land with conviction rather than just shock.
The masterstroke is keeping the scramble's logistics grounded and tactile—you feel the specific panic of adults clawing over grass for literal objects—which makes the emotional desperation read as earned rather than stylized.