The Perfect Place to Cry
2022 · 6m · United States
Directed by Shane Bannon
Genres: dark comedy, horror
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, tense
A young woman drives deep into the woods to cry over a breakup, but her private grief is interrupted when a bloodied man stumbles from the trees — and then a second man attacks him.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Takes the tired 'woman alone in woods' setup and blows it sideways by making her emotional crisis genuinely secondary to whatever violent fever dream stumbles into her frame — most scouts would smooth that collision into coherence, but Bannon lets the tonal whiplash do the work.
The film demonstrates formal control in its tonal oscillation between intimate grief and horror intrusion, though the execution risks undermining its own thematic weight by treating vulnerability and violence as equally valid registers rather than in deliberate conversation.
The decision to keep the camera locked on the woman's face during the violence — her witness position unflinching but unmoved — transforms what could've been gory spectacle into a statement about emotional numbness that the budget never had to announce.
Reviews
Director Shane Bannon sustains an impressive level of tension in such a short runtime, and the film's dark comedy emerges naturally from the absurdity of the protagonist's situation. Terror and tenderness collide in this memorable short.