The Arbiter
2025 · 10m · USA
Directed by Kati Skelton
Genres: comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, theatrical
Two teams have played the same custom game for fifty years, until the wooden wheel central to fair play turns out to be corrupted. An arbiter named Pasquale steps in to restore order, and the players promptly turn on each other.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A fifty-year fake sport hinging on a haunted wheel. Skelton clearly does not care whether you understand the rules, which is exactly the right attitude — most filmmakers explain too much, and explanation is the death of comedy.
An invented sport with decades-deep mythology treated with the gravity of a constitutional crisis over a wooden wheel is a Dupieux-grade absurdist premise, and Skelton's banquet-hall staging sounds genuinely realized. Specific is the word.
Invented sport with fifty years of mythology hinging on a corrupted wooden wheel, treated with constitutional gravity by a motel-banquet-hall tribunal — that's Dupieux-adjacent world-building. Confident comedic premise.
Reviews
An elaborate exploration of trust and authority, similarly committed to the absurd as her previous shorts.