The Bleacher
2024 · 8m · USA
Directed by Adam Wilder, Nicole Daddona
Genres: animation, comedy, horror
Tones: dark, darkly comic, surreal, whimsical
A fragile woman named Rita becomes unhinged over a missing sock at a laundromat and gets sucked into a washing machine, plunging into her own subconscious where she encounters a seductive singing dolphin-man in a surreal limbo of lost socks.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Grotesque clay-looking 3D animation with a seductive singing dolphin-man inside a washing machine, Kate Micucci voicing — Sundance premiere for a Sexy Furby comp, miraculous. I need this immediately.
Wilder and Daddona's grotesque 3D-as-stop-motion with a seductive singing dolphin-man is precisely the sort of Adult Swim-adjacent absurdist commitment that demands either total surrender or polite decline. Sundance World Premiere suggests the gesture lands.
Sundance world premiere for 8:02 of deliberately grotesque 3D animation mimicking clay/stop-motion with visible fingerprint textures — that aesthetic is a choice, not a budget compromise, and Kate Micucci voicing alongside Ben Sinclair plus a singing-dolphin-man musical number in a washing-machine limbo is exactly the kind of feral commitment Sundance picks up.
Reviews
The Bleacher is a fun and whimsical tale that takes us down a dark road into the mind of a monster.
A tight eight minutes of anxiety, a musical horror show meant to disquiet, discomfort, intrigue, and amuse.
Festivals
- Sundance Film Festival 2024
- SXSW 2024