The Long Goodbye
2020 · 12m · UK
Directed by Aneil Karia
Genres: drama
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
A British South Asian family in suburban London prepares for a wedding celebration when a sudden, brutal incursion by a far-right militia shatters the day. The film closes with Riz Ahmed delivering a direct-to-camera spoken-word reckoning with belonging, race, and country.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Karia doesn't just refuse the comfort of a single genre—he demolishes it across three acts, yanking you from kitchen-sink warmth into genuine horror into a rapper's direct accusation that refuses metaphor or safety. This is the kind of film that makes other scouts nervous because it doesn't ask permission to be ugly and formal at once.
The structural audacity here sits in conversation with political essay-films and the British Asian new wave, though the tonal whiplash from domestic realism to violence to performed testimony risks sacrificing the formal coherence that typically elevates provocation into art. Ahmed's monologue arrival feels more like punctuation than earned crescendo.
The pivot to Riz Ahmed's direct address—breaking the fourth wall not for charm but for confrontation—is the bet that rewires everything before it, transforming what could have been a message film into something that implicates the viewer's complicity in the act of watching at all.
Reviews
A terrifying look at an everyday nightmare for members of certain marginalized communities — haunting and thought-provoking.
Told in three very different parts, audiences are lulled by the opening act, shocked at the events in act two, and left breathless by the time the credits roll.
Festivals
- Academy Awards 2022, Best Live Action Short Film (Winner)
- British Independent Film Awards 2021, Best British Short Film (Winner)
- Palm Springs International ShortFest 2021, Best Live Action Short over 15 Minutes (Winner)
- London Critics' Circle Film Awards 2022, British/Irish Short Film of the Year (Winner)