The Piss Saga
2025 · 31m · USA
Directed by Derek Milton
Genres: comedy, documentary
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal, tense
A filmmaker discovers that an electrical utility box on a busy South Pasadena street is repeatedly stacked with bottles of urine. Obsessed with solving the mystery, he installs hidden cameras and launches an absurdist investigation into the identity of the masked 'Piss Bandit,' spiraling into an epic chess match documented concurrently on social media.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Thirty-one minutes of John Wilson-adjacent investigative obsession over an electrical box full of urine bottles, with the Piss Bandit stealing the hidden camera and driving it 126 miles — yes, give me all of this. The viral-TikTok meta-layer earns the runtime.
How To with John Wilson is the obvious touchstone, and a 31-minute investigation that spilled onto TikTok as the bandit stole the surveillance camera has a Nathan Fielder-adjacent recursion to it. I confess curiosity that the comparisons earn — this is precisely the strain of American obsession-documentary worth tracking.
Thirty-one minutes and sixteen seconds is a serious commitment for an electrical-box mystery, but the TikTok-concurrent unfolding plus the bandit physically relocating the hidden camera 126 miles to San Diego is the kind of escalation you can't write. This is John Wilson territory with looser ethics, and I'm here for it.
Reviews
Milton is a one-of-a-kind, and he has polished his onscreen presence to nothing short of captivating.
An incredibly emotional documentary about art and the human need to pursue it.