The Offer
2021 · 10m · USA
Directed by Molly Schiot
Tones: darkly comic, humorous, tense
An intimate dinner between two couples takes a sharp left turn when an unhappily married pair makes an unsolicited proposition to their lesbian friends. What seemed like a casual evening becomes a quiet excavation of marital desperation and boundary violation.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Dinner-party comedies are a graveyard, but flipping the perspective so the heterosexual disaster is the spectacle rather than the norm? Yes, please.
The dinner-party indecent-proposal told from the wrong end of the table, with the queer couple as unwilling audience to straight panic — that's the right inversion, and it's a clean dramatic engine for a chamber piece.
Dinner-party indecent-proposal told from the queer couple's end of the table — that POV inversion is the entire ethical engine of the short, and writer-and-actor Bugge & Kavner writing themselves into the straight-panic seat is a sharp move.