Vertical Valor
2023 · 10m · USA
Directed by Alex Kavutskiy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, humorous
WWIII drafts a clutch of burnout skateboarders into a casualty notification unit. Two L.A. stoners knock on doors to deliver the worst news of strangers' lives, badly.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Yes. Skater stoners delivering KIA notifications. The pitch alone is the kind of thing most filmmakers would coward out of — this one didn't.
WWIII skateboarder casualty-notification unit is a premise that could be either bracingly tasteless or just tasteless; patriotic scoring over the death-knock is at least an intentional formal gesture. Risky but not lazy.
WWIII draftees as a skateboarder casualty-notification unit, with patriotic scoring laid over sick skate footage — that's a thesis-level genre collision and Kavutskiy knows how to land tone collisions. Casting bench is loaded.
Reviews
Perfectly half-baked, the film sets its inappropriately casual attitudes and sick skateboarding footage to patriotic scoring.