Quiero a Sarah Jane
2008 · 14m · Australia
Directed by Spencer Susser
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tender
Jimbo, a 13-year-old living in a post-apocalyptic world where almost everyone has died and his friends' only fun is torturing the zombie chained in the garden, is in love with Sarah.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Susser takes the zombie apocalypse—already bled dry by a thousand films—and drains it entirely, leaving only a 13-year-old's embarrassing crush and his friends' garden-shed sadism; it's a premise that sounds like a bad pitch until you realize the horror and the tenderness are the same thing.
The film's restraint in formal composition mirrors its thematic precision: each scene calculates how to hold domestic ritual and post-human dread in the same frame, a tonal architecture that recalls both Lynchian deadpan and the literature of childhood witness.
The film lives or dies on how Susser shoots the gap between Jimbo's interior longing and the flat mundanity of end-times routine—it's a single sound design choice, the way a zombie's chain clanks against a suburban fence, that makes the whole absurdist machinery feel earned rather than affected.