What’s My Name?
2023 · 6m
Directed by Arthur Studholme
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
Everyone knows the situation: you run into someone you vaguely know and simply cannot remember their name. From there, things get increasingly surreal.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A premise so stupidly perfect it shouldn't work, yet Studholme leans into the surrealism until the social awkwardness becomes genuinely uncanny—this is the kind of high-concept absurdism that makes you wonder why more films trust their weird instincts.
The escalation feels indebted to Buñuel's logic of the irrational, though the execution leans broader than its influences suggest; a competent riff on discomfort-as-comedy that sits comfortably within the surrealist comedy lineage without quite reimagining it.
The tonal pivot from mundane social mortification to full surrealism hinges entirely on Studholme's decision to treat the name-forgetting not as punchline but as ontological crisis—that singular commitment to unsettling tone over gags is what separates this from sketch comedy.
Reviews
Ein sehr wirrer Kurzfilm, der auf beide Arten des Wortes komisch ist.