The Exit Plan
2021 · 14m
Directed by Angus Wilkinson
Genres: dark comedy, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
In an overpopulated world where governments cull the elderly living alone, a widowed grandmother supposedly lives with her daughter. A visiting official begins to suspect the arrangement is not what it seems.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A culling-state thriller that treats government-mandated death as domestic comedy—most festivals would soften this into tragedy-porn, but Wilkinson leans into the absurdist nightmare instead, and the tonal collision is exactly the kind of premise that makes you uncomfortable in the right way.
Sits squarely in the lineage of speculative-realism shorts (Asif Kapadia, Karwoski), with careful mise-en-scène that lets the bureaucratic horror accumulate through restraint rather than exposition—the visiting official's suspicion mirrors the viewer's own dawning dread with formal precision.
The turning point lives entirely in a single line delivery or a look between the daughter and grandmother that reframes everything we thought we understood about who's deceiving whom—that one choice collapses the premise and makes a 14-minute short feel inevitable.