The Carrot
2025 · 15m · United Kingdom
Directed by Joakim Benum
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, tense
A man travels back to his small-town home to tell his parents about the disturbing discovery he made in his brother's freezer.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The Carrot does the thing everyone says you can't do—it makes a freezer reveal genuinely unsettling by refusing to play it straight, letting the family dysfunction breathe instead of cutting to shock. Benum's betting the audience will laugh *and* squirm at the same beat, which means most programmers will pass, which means he's probably onto something.
The film's restraint in visual language and its careful modulation between comic timing and dread situates it squarely in the Scandinavian dark-comedy lineage—precise editing that lets silences do the work, a mise-en-scène that trusts the domestic space to carry psychological weight.
What catches is the decision to keep the camera still during the crucial revelation moment instead of cutting away or playing it for effect—it's a tiny formal choice that transforms the joke from punchline into something that lingers, and it's the kind of economy that reads as confidence rather than budget limitation.