The invisible man
2016 · 10m · Holanda
Directed by Hugo Keijzer
Genres: crime, drama, experimental
Tones: absurdist, dark, surreal
Nick and Kid, two small-time drug traffickers, share a secret: they have high-quality drugs stashed in a barn. But they also have a debt to pay to Frank.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A crime setup that pivots into pure absurdist territory—the invisible man premise flips the expected grit into something genuinely unhinged, and Keijzer commits to the weirdness without winking at the audience. This is the kind of short that makes you uncomfortable because it refuses to be what you thought it signed up to be.
Keijzer's handling of tone and restraint is formally deliberate—the experimental flourishes sit within a precise dramatic frame, positioning itself as a provocation against both crime-drama convention and surrealist orthodoxy. There's real consideration in how the visual language earns its disorientation rather than indulging it.
The specificity lives in how the invisibility conceit isn't deployed as spectacle but as a pressure point on performance and framing—a single formal constraint that forces every scene to communicate through absence and implication, making a micro-budget constraint do the heavy lifting of the entire narrative.