Drijf

There’s a twisted kind of pleasure in watching two people held together by shared resentment slowly tear each other apart on screen. It’s easy to laugh and disassociate when they’re exaggerated caricatures, but once the cracks start to look familiar and you recognise some of your own toxic traits in them, the humour can become unexpectedly unsettling…

The opening scene in Drijf (which translates to float/push) sets the tone perfectly: a naked couple stranded at sea, the woman anxiously scanning the horizon for a solution to an unknown problem, while the man beside her is absentmindedly playing with his flaccid penis. Drawing inspiration from disaster films and his own failed romantic relationships, Levi Stoops crafts a darkly funny 15-minute short about a couple struggling – and mostly failing – to survive both their shared reality and their fractured connection. With a stripped back animation style that creates emotional distance, and cleverly observed writing that draws us back in, Drijf allows us to relate to the characters’ emotional journey and feel their pain. It’s a uniquely funny piece, so it comes as no surprise that the Belgian director took home the Short Jury Prize at the 2023 edition of Annecy.  

Jeremy and Aurora sharing an intimate moment during their time at sea.

The story follows Jeremy and Aurora, a couple who set out to sea hoping that a change of scenery and a bit of dolphin watching might help them reconnect. But lost and adrift, naked on a log in the vast openness of the ocean, their struggle soon shifts from hopeful escape to a desperate and bloody fight for survival. Can they find growth and reconciliation, or will they lose a piece of themselves along the way?

“When I started working with Anemone Valcke, a very good friend of mine and very talented writer and actor, we realized that we should make something about our own relationships” – Stoops shared in an interview for Animation Magazine. – “What we ended up doing is writing from our own toxic behaviors. For me that meant being passive, entitled, emotionally lazy. For Anemone it meant taking the lead, and by doing that, doing the work instead of the other person. It became a story about people who expect different things from each other but never really talk about it. And about how modern, non-macho men exercise power over women.”

Seven years in the making, using only TVPaint, the animation style is deliberately simple, almost child-like, creating a distance between the audience and the characters’ plight. But beneath this simplicity, the dialogue (and the heavy silences between it) ring uncomfortably true. The barely concealed resentment that’s clearly been simmering for years, the mounting frustrations and the disconnect between their sexual desires – it’s all pretty familiar. These are traits and emotions you may recognise and have, at one time or another, brought into your own past relationships. I know I certainly have.

Jeremy’s encounter with a random bird is one of many surreal moments in the short.

This emotional realism is what makes the film’s more absurd moments so great. Without giving too much away, it’s worth noting a few standout scenes that are genuine strokes of comedic genius. From the botched attempt to put an injured bird out of its misery, to Aurora being attacked by a giant fish, and the grisly DIY amputation, these are hardly situations any of us would’ve ever faced. Yet beneath the absurdity lies a very real tension: Jeremy’s flailing sense of masculinity and his overbearing codependency, and Aurora’s growing impatience and controlling nature. It’s this precise depiction of relational dysfunction that makes the randomness properly laugh-out-loud funny. That, and Jeremy’s dolphin impression.

Drijf is easily one of the funniest shorts I’ve seen in a while. Its dark, absurd humour cuts through the chaos of a messy relationship with razor-sharp precision, making the emotional turmoil both hilarious and painfully true.