The Waiting Room
2026 · 10m · USA
Directed by Jonas Bishop Hayes
Genres: drama, experimental, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Two women meet in a room that won't hold still in space or time, and the surrounding surreal melodrama treats their shared memory like a haunting. Trauma rendered as expressionist set design.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Two women, one room that won't behave, memory bleeding through the walls. The actors wrote their own trap — the production design lays the bait.
Jonas Bishop Hayes lets two writer-stars co-write the dream logic they're trapped in — Personal Shopper's trauma haunting staged as expressionist chamber piece. The fingerprints on the dream are what sell it.
Writer-stars co-wrote the script they're trapped in, so the dream logic has fingerprints — Jonas Bishop Hayes's surreal melodrama uses expressionist set design as trauma rendering, which can work if the room actually holds.
Reviews
Shrouded in mystery and crafted with unsettling dream logic.