Wakey Wakey
2018 · 10m · USA
Directed by Mary Dauterman
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: melancholic, surreal, tense
A woman tries to leave for a trip while her boyfriend mysteriously refuses to help, and the morning warps into surreal dread, a tooth falls out, a sea appears outside. Domestic friction as low-grade nightmare logic.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Pre-fame Sennott doing the small-scale dread thing before she became a brand. A relationship that wakes up wrong, and stays that way.
An early Rachel Sennott vehicle from before the world caught on, working in dressed-down Lynchian domestic-friction dread — the formal premise (tooth falls out, sea outside the window) is more interesting than most relationship shorts attempt. Worth the catch-up.
Early Rachel Sennott in a domestic-dread piece where teeth fall out and a sea appears outside — that's the right surreal-creep image vocabulary for relationship-as-nightmare. Dauterman's eye plus a now-known performer makes this notable both ways.