Teething
2020 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Glen Matthews
Genres: dark comedy, horror, thriller
A night-shift janitor at an orphanage discovers something feeding on a colicky baby, and his failure to save her creates a worse problem.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A janitor-versus-creature premise that pivots into something worse—the guy's heroic failure becomes the actual horror. It's the kind of subversive tonal trap that makes you sit wrong in your seat, and most scouts would've passed because it refuses to land anywhere comfortable.
Matthews locates this in the lineage of folk-horror and body-dread cinema, but the 9-minute constraint forces a formal precision in editing that transforms premise into genuine unease; the film knows exactly when to cut away and when to hold.
The decision to play the colicky baby's cries as both vulnerability and genuine threat—never letting us settle on whether we're supposed to sympathize with the infant or fear it—is the thread that holds the whole tonal contradiction together.