There’s a hint of trepidation in ARE YOU KIDDING?, the title of the London Film Festival’s strand of darkly comedic shorts, which reflects the disquieting uncertainty of the scenarios depicted in each piece of work. The selection spans a wide range of positions on the dark-to-comedic spectrum (sometimes even within the individual shorts themselves). Still, it is uniformly engaging thanks to each film’s capacity to twist and turn narratively.
CANDY BAR, directed by Nash Edgerton, sees Damon Herriman (who also balanced bleakness and humour so well in JUDY AND PUNCH) seemingly making a connection with a young girl (Zumi Edgerton) who claims he looks like her recently deceased father. After their affecting conversation at a cinema concession stand, CANDY BAR turns in a way that succinctly and effectively captures children’s ability to make fools of us all, along with their incredible blend of deviousness and naivety. The film is perhaps the most straight comedy of the bunch in the strand, but has a cold edge nonetheless.
“CANDY BAR turns in a way that succinctly and effectively captures children’s ability to make fools of us all, along with their incredible blend of deviousness and naivety.”
MOTHER GOOSE is decidedly thinner and more straightforward than the other shorts in terms of script, although still engaging. Sophie Thomson plays a woman, grieving for her husband, who raises a goose to eat it at Christmas. The film features delightfully wide, Roy Andersson-style framing for many scenes, shot in a stylish black and white. The goose is also voiced by Ralph Ineson, whose famous vocals add a dark edge to an otherwise fairly perfunctory countdown to the festive season, leading to a surprisingly grotesque finale.
LITTLE MONSTERS is a more restrained portrait of the interplay between visually impaired teenager Erwan (Samuel Kalambayi), his wheelchair using contemporary David (Oscar Bloess), and Agathe, the driver of their school transport (which she names ‘The Friendship Van’). The characters are well-defined, and the verbal sparring between Erwan and David is engaging. Alice de Lencquesaing humorously acts out Agathe’s frustration in physical asides. However, the story is frustratingly sparse and an odd fit amongst the other shorts here, being a more obviously character-driven vignette than anything notably bizarre. That being said, even if a short film shouldn’t aim to become a feature, the characters shared by writer-director Pablo Léridon here show the most promise for expansion.
“The visuals and editing [of PARTY ANIMAL] ramp up the feeling of madness, while the use of callbacks in the dialogue nicely builds the comedy.”
PARTY ANIMAL is more unsettling, with a barber (Nabhaan Rizwan) tasked with trimming the hair of a local politician’s donkey ears, learning the politician, Reuben Stanton (Edward Baker-Duly), is turning into a donkey. The disconcerting music pitches the absurd inception of the story immediately into disquieting territory. When he delivers this information to his partner (Hebe Beardsall), a Stanton fan, she dismisses his concerns as “rumours” spread by “trolls”. From there, Ali Gill’s short turns into a twisted and funny musing upon political discourse and how the obvious is obfuscated or ignored. The visuals and editing ramp up the feeling of madness, while the use of callbacks in the dialogue nicely builds the comedy.
END OF PLAY is the most fantastical entry and feels like a melange of influences from fantasy and sci-fi, including the sitcom The Good Place. The short opens with a world designer – presenting the ‘world’ in his hands as one might a commissioned commercial artwork – brutally dispatched by a dissatisfied ‘Client’, a group of several besuited individuals spouting monotonous and deadened corporate lingo (“We hope we find you well”). Junior designer ‘Number Seven’ (Sope Dirisu) is tapped as the replacement, replete with unrealised ideas for worlds, but under instructions to deliver satisfactorily to a pressing deadline. Dirisu (who is also in MY FATHER’S SHADOW at LFF 2025) is superb, and the production design of writer-director Edem Wornoo’s film is precise and engaging as a satire of either corporate settings, commercial imperatives in creative industries, or both.
“Overall, the ARE YOU KIDDING? strand has (for the most part) a commanding understanding of tone, pitching the collection into a tradition of morbid, dark and absurd humour.”
Hoku Uchiyama’s WHITCH is the shortest entry, and predictably features the most severe switches in tone across its five-minute run, which it handles well. After putting her daughter to bed, Alicia Blasingame’s suburban mother finds an older woman, Gladys (Rosemary Hochschild), in her home with bloody and occult rituals on her agenda. Many horror films – including many modern ones – have leaned on older female bodies as a shorthand for evil and decay, and WHITCH undercuts this trope neatly with a comedic swerve that manages to pack in satirical swipes at both suburban busybodies and horror cinema.
Overall, the ARE YOU KIDDING? strand has (for the most part) a commanding understanding of tone, pitching the collection into a tradition of morbid, dark and absurd humour. There’s an element of high-concept comedy being immune to the sort of bad-faith engagement with obvious ideas that seems familiar in the 2025 media landscape, and the shorts here invariably manage to make their points in oblique and clever ways.
Editorial note: This article will be updated after the embargo passes for CRAB NO. 7 and THE WASP (OR THE SHEER BEAUTY OF ACCEPTING YOURSELF), after the first public screening of the strand. ARE YOU KIDDING? screens at the 2025 BFI London Film Festival on October 10th at 20:45 and October 16th at 16:30.