Purgatory
2025 · 6m · UK
Directed by Henry Thompson
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, melancholic
Isaac, a small-town doomsayer, spends his days on the sidewalks trying to recruit passersby into Satan's army. The film tracks his quiet routine of rejection as he searches, with stubborn earnestness, for someone who will simply see him.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Most people would turn this into a joke—the Satan recruiter as a walking punchline. Thompson refuses that easy move entirely, which is bold, but the film doesn't quite earn the tonal shift; it sits in the middle distance watching sadness without interrogating why we should care.
There's a lineage here—the deadpan character study, the Haneke-ish refusal to manipulate—but Thompson doesn't quite have the compositional rigor or narrative architecture to justify the formal restraint; the melancholy reads as restraint rather than choice.
The decision to play Isaac's rejection straight, with no ironic winking, transforms what could be a sketch into something genuinely aching—and it's sustained entirely by Thompson's willingness to let the camera hold on a stranger's small gesture of acknowledgment, the single moment where someone actually sees him.
Reviews
A solid attempt at a depiction of the daily life of a Doomsayer with a wide array of impressive formal choices, even with its limited production budget.
The direction is engaging, with frequent use of wide-angle shots to present the neighbourhood... the lead performance is endearing and easy to connect to.