The Deserter

The scouts

A soldier gaming a sick-leave loophole on the eve of its cancellation is such a perfectly petty, bureaucratic nightmare that it loops back to being genuinely absurd — the premise is the joke, and Wei lets it breathe into something darker than you'd expect from a setup this ridiculous.

Wei's deadpan staging and the escalating formality of the sergeant's threat (a personal visit) recalls the social comedies of Ealing, though filtered through contemporary anxiety about institutional power and bodily autonomy in ways that feel precisely calibrated.

The entire film hinges on the sergeant's decision to show up in person rather than simply order compliance — a single choice that transforms this from sketch comedy into something with real stakes, and Wei commits to it with a restraint that makes the absurdity land harder.