RAT!
2024 · 17m · United States
Directed by Neal Suresh Mulani
Genres: dark comedy, satire, thriller
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, tense
When a disgruntled music journalist accuses a global pop star of queerbaiting, the singer's devoted fans descend on his remote cabin to wreak havoc and seek retribution.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
RAT! takes the queerbaiting discourse — normally Twitter-bound pablum — and weaponizes it into actual anarchic horror, which is exactly the kind of subversive premise that makes consensus critics squirm. Mulani's refusal to let anyone off the hook, least of all the journalist or the fans, is the kind of contrarian move that actually earns its bite.
The film's formal control—how it escalates from cabin satire into something genuinely unsettling without losing its comic velocity—suggests a director aware of the thriller lineage he's working within, though the execution occasionally strains under the weight of its satirical ambitions.
What locks this whole thing into place is the choice to make the fans' rage feel genuinely justified even as it's destroying everything—that moral vertigo, sustained across 17 minutes on what must be a modest budget, comes from a single directorial conviction about complicity that reframes every scene.
Reviews
What begins as a sharp, satirical comedy quickly spirals into something far more sinister – a tense, unnerving home-invasion thriller. As the celebrity's devoted fans go to increasingly extreme lengths to force the journalist to retract his video, the film explores just how dangerous – and absurd – the cult of internet fame can become.