To Hell With You
2024 · 15m · United States
Directed by Jason Sheedy
Genres: animation, dark comedy, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
After a failed exorcism kills a college graduate possessed by an obnoxious demon, an angel intervenes to stop the demon from dragging his soul to Hell, leaving him a ghost caught in a battle over his salvation.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A dead grad caught between celestial bureaucrats fighting over his soul should be schmaltz, but Sheedy commits so hard to the absurdist logistics of heavenly red tape that it becomes genuinely subversive—nobody else would've made the demon the most honest voice in the room.
The film's formal elegance lies in how it navigates the competing visual languages of animation to stage a theological debate; the restraint in its design choices—what's animated plainly versus what gets rendered ornate—reveals a director conscious of how form argues meaning.
The specific tonal choice to play the angel's intervention as bureaucratic frustration rather than heroic rescue is what transforms this from a clever premise into something that lands—Sheedy recognizes that the smallest shift in attitude toward a stock character is worth more than budget.
Festivals
- Dances With Films 2024