Puppet Games
2009 · 4m · USA
Directed by Nick Mann
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, fantasy
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, theatrical
This is a short film I wrote, directed, and edited on 35 mm and edited in Final Cut Pro.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A coming-of-age film that weaponizes puppets and surrealism to interrogate childhood power dynamics—it's exactly the kind of theatrical darkly-comic premise that makes people uncomfortable, which means it's doing something right.
Mann's command of theatrical staging and tonal register recalls a lineage of puppet-inflected metaphor cinema, from Švankmajer to contemporary art practice; the formal restraint in a four-minute span demonstrates considerable curatorial precision.
The decision to make the puppets neither cute nor fully grotesque—hovering in that unsettling middle register—is what transforms this from concept into something that actually lodges in your chest.