Rachel from New York
2019 · 8m
Directed by Jeanne Jo
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, romance
Tones: darkly comic, humorous, tender
A recent New York transplant to Los Angeles, still not over a breakup, goes on a first date with a man outside her type, and her anxious gaffes reveal how out of place she really is.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent rom-com about a girl being awkward on a date—exactly the kind of consensus-friendly material that makes me want to sleep. Jo doesn't subvert the transplant-anxiety premise or push the romantic fumble into anything genuinely strange; she just executes it very well, which is the opposite of what I'm hunting for.
Jo constructs a deceptively tight emotional architecture here, using Rachel's verbal stumbles and LA's spatial indifference to quietly interrogate the gap between self-image and reality—the editing pace knows exactly when to hold on discomfort and when to cut away, placing this squarely in the lineage of tender, formally aware indie comedy.
The entire film pivots on Jo's choice to let Rachel's anxious monologues overlap and interrupt themselves rather than land cleanly—a single sound design decision that transforms generic first-date jitters into something genuinely human and unglamorous, where the awkwardness becomes the whole truth of the character.