Staff Pick
2021 · 15m
Directed by Mitch deQuilettes
Genres: dark comedy, drama, experimental
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, surreal
A male filmmaker's narcissistic behaviors radiate outward across four alternate realities — a straight man with a gay friend in LA, an actor questioning a bi-curious role, a girlfriend who feels exploited by their collaboration. A mind-bending set of vignettes about art, power, and self-delusion.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A filmmaker putting his own narcissism on trial across four realities is the most brutally self-aware thing I've seen in a while — and deeply uncomfortable.
Mitch deQuilettes's male-filmmaker-narcissism across four realities is a vertiginous setup; the meta-critique of art-bro behavior is well-mapped territory and demands real execution to feel new.
The director's real-life ego dissected across four parallel realities simultaneously — Adaptation-meets-queer-LA-mumblecore-nightmare is an ambitious structural game with a deep cast (Schafer, Lacy, Darge), and the self-aware melodrama can cut.