Shrooms Aliens and Rock N Roll
2025 · 6m
Directed by Erika Salazar
Genres: comedy, sci-fi, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
An 80s rock star -- and a jerk, at that -- takes a shroom trip that spirals into a surreal sci-fi comedy of aliens and comeuppance.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a film that takes the tired 'drug trip reveals truth' premise and actually *commits* to the bit: an 80s rock asshole getting cosmically humiliated by aliens is exactly the kind of premise that makes you go 'wait, WHAT?' before you realize Salazar's already three moves ahead. Absurdist comedy that doesn't wink at the audience is rarer than it should be.
Salazar's command of surrealist visual grammar—the way the film's grammar shifts as the protagonist descends—sits in a lineage from Gilliam through *Moonlight City* without genuflecting to it, and that formal restraint in a 6-minute format is genuinely difficult work.
The throughline here is Salazar's choice to keep the rock star's performance *committed* even as everything around him dissolves into sci-fi nonsense—that refusal to let him become a joke of himself until the very end is what actually sells the cosmic comeuppance, and it's a performer decision that costs nothing but costs everything.