Strangers
2023 · 7m
Directed by James Fink-Jensen
A comedy of awkwardness about a blind date between two university students, one of whom forgot to take his medication, derailed by a restroom fiasco, a disgruntled barista, and the delightfully unhinged arrival of the young woman's flatmate.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent hangout comedy with a forgotten-meds setup that could've gone somewhere genuinely unhinged, but instead plays it safe—the flatmate chaos is the only moment that feels like it's actually rupturing the formula, and it arrives too late to salvage the predictability.
Fink-Jensen demonstrates assured comedic timing and a clean understanding of ensemble dynamics, though the film's whimsical tone doesn't quite justify itself against the rather familiar architecture of awkwardness-at-dinner-table beats.
The restroom fiasco and barista antagonism are sturdy scaffolding, but the film lives or dies on how the untreated-medication performance inflects every scene—and that's the specific choice here that either makes the awkwardness feel earned or just laboriously cute.
Reviews
The cuteness is the point, and everyone here did, in fact, understand the assignment. Strangers ends with not one left standing, transformed into friends and lovers with all sorts of anniversaries to dream of.