Staycation
2017 · 10m · USA
Directed by Zach Fleming
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic, tense
A man shows up alone in New York for a trip he was supposed to take with his girlfriend, lugging tickets to a show and a vacancy where she should be. The Airbnb he booked, predictably, has its own ideas about hospitality.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Joanna Arnow is in this and that alone is a vault-tier guarantee of weirdness. Plus a sad solo NYC trip with a haunted Airbnb is the kind of low-key premise that always overdelivers.
The sad-bastard-alone-in-NYC subgenre with the Airbnb itself as a character with bad intentions is a sturdy comic premise, and Joanna Arnow's presence as a cameo is the right deadpan-menace signal. Bujalski-adjacent loneliness done well.
Sad-bastard-alone-in-NYC subgenre but with the Airbnb itself as a character with bad intentions — Joanna Arnow's deadpan menace in the cast list is the most telling craft detail here. Promising configuration of dread + cringe.