Snow Globe
2022 · 7m
Directed by Christopher Ryan Laughter
Genres: dark comedy, drama, thriller
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tense
A devious housewife prepares a killer Christmas gift for her husband, but when reality comes knocking, her past and future collide.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is basically a Christmas-themed revenge fantasy we've seen a hundred times, dressed up in dark-comedy drag—and Laughter doesn't have the teeth to subvert it or make it genuinely weird. It's competent thriller-lite that knows exactly what lane it's in, which means it's not for me.
A neat formal exercise in tonal balance—the shift from domestic thriller to reality collision is cleanly edited, and there's something classically structured about watching a housewife's meticulous fantasy unravel against the frame of the snow globe itself. Solid festival construction, though it doesn't quite earn its own ambition.
The whole film hinges on how the snow globe functions as both literal object and psychological boundary, and Laughter's choice to keep it in frame, gleaming and untouched while chaos swirls around it, is the one decision that makes the dark comedy actually *work*—that small, cold perfection against messy human reality is what saves this from being forgettable.