The First Men
2016 · 13m · United States
Directed by Benjamin Kegan
Genres: crime, dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, tense
An indebted high-school teacher on a shopping trip at the mall with her mother crosses paths with a student who is also the teenage drug dealer she owes money to, in an adaptation of Stacey Richter's short story.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is *almost* there—teacher-drug-dealer collision, class anxiety, moral vertigo at the mall—but it feels like it's playing the dark comedy for easy discomfort rather than genuine subversion; the contrarian move would've been to make us actually complicit, not just titillated.
Richter's adaptation sits somewhere between indie provocation and psychological realism, and Kegan holds that tension with formal restraint; the tonal register—never fully committing to satire or tragedy—positions it thoughtfully within contemporary American cinema's discomfort with class.
What works here is the decision to play the encounter itself as mundane rather than melodramatic—the specificity of a mall setting, the mother present, the transaction happening in plain sight—transforms a loaded premise into something genuinely unsettling through refusal of spectacle.