Some Of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby
2016 · 10m · USA
Directed by Chris Rubino
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tense
Five bored high school senior girls plan a party for their friend Colby — and execute a quietly perverse scheme around it. The casual cruelty rises until you're not sure who the title is warning you about.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Lifting the Barthelme title is a flex. Putting it on teen girls is the only version of the flex I want to see.
Barthelme's notoriously menacing story as the spine, transposed to a teen-girl clique, is a smart literary graft — Heathers and The Craft as siblings, with pastel menace. Strong pull.
Donald Barthelme as the spine for a teen-girl-clique short — the source material is already menacing and Chris Rubino's title-design pedigree suggests visual command. Heathers/Craft lineage feels earned.
Reviews
They're so pretty and they're so cruel — the film calls into question where, exactly, the titular 'threat' lies.