The Speed of Time
2020 · 12m
Directed by William J. Stribling
A man using a time-travel pizza delivery app starts meddling with his own past, one order at a time.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A time-travel pizza app is exactly the kind of high-concept absurdist premise that makes people groan before they realize Stribling actually commits to the bit—there's no winking, no safety net, just a man systematically undoing his life one delivery at a time, and somehow it works.
Stribling's film sits comfortably in the lineage of speculative comedy shorts like those of Chris Nash or Sam Egland, using the sci-fi conceit as a formal constraint that generates both structure and pathos, though the tonal balance between whimsy and consequence occasionally softens the formal edges.
The real lift here is the decision to play the protagonist's mounting panic with almost no dialogue—Stribling lets the mounting stack of paradoxes live in the actor's face and posture, which turns what could've been a gimmick premise into something genuinely disquieting on a shoestring.