Quasiment Royale
2026 · 2m
Directed by Lucas Michel
Genres: comedy, crime, thriller
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, humorous
Agent James must face La Griffe in a poker game with somewhat special rules: no cards, but letters — and between him and the tournament are La Griffe's millions and his rotten puns.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A spy thriller that ditches the gun for a pun machine and swaps cards for letters—it's the kind of genre-demolition that shouldn't work but does, because Michel commits to the absurdity like it's a real heist. Finally, someone making a crime film that's actually *fun* instead of slavishly genre-correct.
The formal restraint is admirable—a 2-minute constraint that demands every comic beat and narrative pivot land with precision—though the pun-heavy premise risks collapsing under its own conceptual weight rather than earning the weight through tradition or rigor.
The reveal that the entire game hinges on wordplay rather than chance is the single choice that elevates this from sketch to story, and that decision cascades through every edit and performance beat to create something that punches way above its runtime.