Communication with people, in general, can be a strange experience in itself. There can be miscommunications, walking into a conversation at a strange time, or a language barrier that makes for weird interaction. Some of these interactions can leave us laughing at the uncomfortable nature of the experience as if we were just talking to someone from a different planet entirely. You Wouldn’t Understand is a short that combines the comedy and anxiety of being stuck in a strange alien conversation with the bizarreness of dream logic to create a hilariously strange experience.

A man is happily enjoying a book while lounging on a picnic blanket, surrounded by a wide assortment of meats, cheeses, and fruit. In the distance, he spots a figure that is running that becomes two figures before disappearing behind a bush. After a moment one of the figures, a man clad in a classical white suit exits the bush and approaches the picnic. After exchanging some disjointed pleasantries the strange man asks if the picnic man has any “horsey sauce”. After deciphering that the stranger is asking for horseradish, the picnic man gives him some and the conversation proceeds to only get more bizarre from there.

What makes You Wouldn’t Understand so brilliant is its mastery over an ever-evolving tone. For a short run time of only nine minutes, it spends the first minute establishing the tranquility of the man’s picnic before anything odd begins to happen. From there, the conversation with the stranger feels disjointed and weird with the music only intensifying the eerie feeling the stanger conveys, just before the short takes a deep dive into the bizarre comedy of it all. Where these tonal shifts would feel like whiplash in any other media, it is handled very carefully so the transitions are seamless and only add to the hilarity of the situation as a whole.

9 out of 10