Punch-Drunk
2022 · 13m · UK
Directed by Larry Ketang, Liam White
In a crowded Marseille cafe, a man's quiet lunch is disrupted by a chatty stranger, and over the course of a single conversation his carefully buried past begins to catch up with him in real time.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's doing the single-take thriller now, but Ketang and White strip it down so far it almost becomes boring—which is exactly the subversive move: they're betting that suffocation reads louder than spectacle, and honestly, it mostly works.
The near-one-shot discipline here recalls the spatial rigor of early Bresson or the interrogation methodologies of Costa-Gavras, where form becomes argument—the off-screen interrogator becomes a formal constraint that deepens rather than limits the psychological architecture.
That static close-up on the protagonist's face is doing all the heavy lifting: every micro-contraction, every held breath becomes the entire film's language, a choice that turns an actor's restraint into the only special effect that matters.
Reviews
The tension holds, it's a good story, and the bold idea to have it almost all in one shot works well and heightens the suspense.
A masterfully suspenseful near one-shot thriller about a man whose history finally catches up to him.
Festivals
- Raindance Film Festival 2021
- BAFTA 2022