Service Bus
2025 · 4m · Denmark
Directed by Elmer Mikael Lødemel
Genres: comedy, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
Rolf boards a six-and-a-half-hour bus ride from Viborg to Oslo without bringing any water. Dehydrated and regretting it, he notices the service button above his seat and presses it, half as a joke — unwittingly setting off a chain of events that will quench his thirst, but at what cost?
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A four-minute moral catastrophe dressed as a bus comedy—Lødemel commits the beautiful crime of making us complicit in Rolf's escalating desperation, turning a service button into a trap door that opens onto something genuinely unsettling masquerading as absurdist humor.
The film locates itself squarely in the Nordic tradition of understated darkly comic shorts, with meticulous pacing that allows each beat of consequence to land cleanly; the formal restraint mirrors the confined space itself, making economy of gesture do the work of escalation.
The masterstroke here is holding the camera steady on Rolf's face as the stakes compound—there's no cutting away, no visual relief, just the single choice to let his dawning regret accumulate in real time while the absurdity compounds around him.