Push Up
2019 · 14m
Directed by Bryan Enk
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A drunken request for pushups becomes an endearing, quietly moving portrait of a couple, brimming with insight beneath its uneventful surface.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A drunk guy asks for pushups and everyone expects chaos—instead Enk gives you restraint, tenderness, the opposite of what the setup promises. It's almost too quiet for its own good, but that refusal to perform is exactly the subversion that makes it stick.
The film sits squarely in the American realist tradition—intimate, behaviorally precise—and Enk's editing resists sentimentality by letting silences do the work; there's a disciplined hand here that knows when to cut away and when to hold, the mark of a director aware of what understated actually costs.
The entire film turns on one choice: letting the camera stay on them *after* the pushups, watching how their bodies settle back into companionable quiet. That single decision—refusing the joke, staying present—transforms a bit into a portrait, and it's done with almost no budget at all.
Reviews
And yet this is a moving film, brimming with insight and emotional intelligence. But the film finds the paths to connection between two people who have known each other in and out, and do not always like what they know of the other.