The Recipe
2022 · 14m · United States
Directed by Cameron Holly Dexter
Genres: dark comedy, drama, thriller
Tones: dark, melancholic, surreal
A housewife in the 1970s procures all the ingredients for a deadly dish that liberates her from not only her marriage, but reality itself.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A housewife poisoning her way out of patriarchy AND consensus reality—now that's a premise that refuses to apologize for itself. Most scouts would hedgehog this into 'psychological thriller,' but the film knows it's weirder and darker than that, and it doesn't blink.
The film sits at an interesting threshold between domestic drama and surrealist fable, though the tonal balancing act occasionally strains the formal architecture; there's craft here in how it deploys 70s production design as both prison and escape hatch.
The decision to treat the cooking sequences—each ingredient procurement, each preparation—with the same patient, ritualistic attention usually reserved for crime procedurals is what sells the whole thing; it's the specificity of that choice that transforms a revenge fantasy into something genuinely unsettling.