Uncle Johnny
2025 · 12m · USA
Directed by Margaux Susi
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Rose spends the day bowling with her neurodivergent uncle, as she grapples with the secret that he is dying of cancer.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects this to be a grief-and-acceptance tearjerker, and Susi's restraint in refusing that—letting the bowling alley *stay* a bowling alley instead of becoming a metaphor—is quietly subversive in a way that actually earns its melancholy.
The film sits confidently in the lineage of Dardenne-adjacent intimate portraiture, where formal understatement and the durational patience of a single activity become the grammar of emotional complexity.
The decision to let Rose's dawning awareness emerge through the spatial geography of the bowling alley—where she notices her uncle's fatigue in the geometry of his approach rather than dialogue—is the hinge that lifts this from earnest to necessary.
Reviews
One of the greatest short films of 2026 so far is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Uncle Johnny. The amount of emotion and depth captured in just 12 minutes is profound.