Rubes
2023 · 7m
Directed by Nathan Alan Bunker
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, thriller
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
Two disgruntled teachers construct an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine to exact revenge on everyone who has wronged them.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A Rube Goldberg revenge fantasy is exactly the kind of high-concept premise that should be unbearably cute, but Bunker somehow makes the escalation feel genuinely menacing—the contraption becomes a metaphor for systemic cruelty, which is either brilliant or self-serious depending on your tolerance for dark comedy.
The film's formal constraint—building narrative tension through mechanical cause-and-effect rather than character development—echoes a lineage from Tati's visual comedy to contemporary maximalist design, though the execution hinges on whether the editing rhythm can sustain both absurdist humor and genuine dread.
The decision to keep the revenge targets faceless and interchangeable transforms what could be a gimmick premise into something icier—it's not about catharsis, it's about the architecture of grievance itself, and that tonal choice in a 7-minute frame is what separates this from festival fodder.