The Retirement Party
2025 · 7m · United States
Directed by Justin Schaack, Kristin Schaack
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, theatrical
A meek antique dealer's coworker rewrites ten shared minutes into an absurd alternate version and convinces half the office it is true.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
This is the kind of premise that makes you immediately distrust your own eyes—a coworker literally rewrites reality and wins half the office over, which is either devastatingly smart satire about how belief works or complete absurdist chaos, and the fact that it *works* is exactly why everyone else will sleep on it.
The Schaacks execute a formally disciplined inversion of the office comedy, using the theatrical conceit of competing narratives as both structure and commentary on institutional credulity—a clever formal choice grounded in a lineage of metanarrative comedy.
The reveal that half the office has been convinced by a pure fiction hinges entirely on the performance choices around credulity and persuasion, and the decision to play it with absolute deadpan commitment rather than winking at the audience is what gives the absurdity its teeth.
Reviews
A thoroughly pleasant and smart film. Production-wise, it's pretty simple, but it still manages to nail it, driven by a good script and a great lead performance.