The Weird Cousin
2021 · 10m · USA
Directed by Megan Patsel
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age
Tones: absurdist, humorous, melancholic
An aspiring musician stranded in her childhood home during quarantine becomes obsessed with maintaining her status as the family's certified weirdo. Cue a series of low-stakes performances of eccentricity in front of younger cousins who couldn't care less.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Pandemic films are mostly insufferable, but one where the protagonist's crisis is that her personal brand has no audience? Now we're talking. Aimless in the right way.
A quarantine improv cast almost entirely from the director's extended family becomes a homemade ethnographic comedy — that's a real conceptual frame for a familiar form. Patsel's commitment to the weirdo-personal-brand bit is the actual material.
Cast almost entirely from Patsel's actual extended family during quarantine — a homemade ethnographic comedy where the porch-karaoke mic-hog is real sibling rivalry, not a sketch. Set-up-your-life-as-the-shoot is a quietly admirable lockdown move.