Thawed
2018 · 6m · UK
Directed by Jon Drever
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, humorous
In a near-future where cryogenic resurrection is available on a budget, a woman thaws out her long-frozen husband — or at least the part of him she could afford to bring back — and the reunited couple promptly settle into bickering domesticity.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A talking head in a bread bin—the kind of premise that makes programmers nervous and makes Felix nod slowly. Drever takes the most absurd sci-fi setup imaginable and refuses to wink at it, letting the domestic banality do all the heavy lifting while everyone else would've already pivoted to sentiment.
There's a lineage of British deadpan absurdism running through this—a formal restraint that recalls Cold Comfort Farm through to contemporary gallery video—and Diane Morgan's glacial performance against the literal disembodied head is technically precise in ways most comedies wouldn't bother with.
The bread bin. That single production decision—the specificity of that particular domestic vessel holding a severed head—reframes the entire film from gimmick to genuine dark comedy, and it's a choice that costs nothing but reveals everything about how Drever thinks.
Reviews
Jon Drever's comedy short Thawed imagines what the future of cryogenics might look like for those of us who only have a limited budget to work with — featuring the acting and writing talents of Diane Morgan and Alistair Green as a recently reunited, bickering couple.
Great straight/absurd dynamic — 'Apparently you stop screaming on day five' is the kind of throwaway line that captures the film's deadpan dark humor.