Red Velvet
2023 · 13m · United States
Directed by Blake Simon
Genres: dark comedy, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, tense
On what appears to be the last night on earth, a nervous man awaits an escort in his motel room, possibly already infected with a mind-bending apocalypse.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A nervous guy waiting for an escort in a motel room shouldn't be the setup for an apocalypse thriller, and yet Simon commits to this absurd collision of intimacy and cosmic dread like it's the most natural thing in the world—exactly the kind of premise that makes consensus critics squirm and makes me pay attention.
The film's control of tone and pacing—how it holds both the erotic tension and the existential horror in the same frame without collapsing into pastiche—suggests a director aware of how genre hybridity has been attempted before and determined to earn its right to live in that tradition.
The masterstroke here is the sound design in those quiet moments before the escort arrives: the hum of the motel, the ambient static that gradually shifts into something wrong, all on a clearly modest budget, and suddenly you're unsettled in a way that a bigger production's expensive visual effects could never achieve.
Reviews
I kept wondering all along if he was just imagining it, which is what we're supposed to be wondering. This is fun.