The Dark Box
2017 · 8m · Nigeria
Directed by Yemi Jolaoso
Genres: dark comedy, romance, sci-fi
Tones: dark, darkly comic, whimsical
A young man uses a one-minute time machine to retry seducing a woman on a park bench, then discovers the device has a dark side.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A one-minute time loop used to perfect a pickup—sounds saccharine until it goes genuinely dark, and suddenly you're watching a sci-fi rom-com that inverts every expectation about both genres. Jolaoso commits to the weird premise hard enough that it stops being a gimmick and becomes something subversive.
The film understands its debts to both romantic comedy timing and sci-fi body horror, braiding them together with formal precision in eight minutes—a compact argument about desire, repetition, and consequence that lands somewhere between Kaufman and Roeg.
The entire film hinges on the decision to keep the woman's reactions *consistent* across loops while the man's desperation compounds—that single choice transforms what could've been a cutesy gimmick into something genuinely unsettling and human.
Reviews
It starts off very funny and cute and light but somewhere around the half-way point, this "funny, cute and light" short film actually gets a little "Black Mirror"-esque on us.