Rob Munday
A monologue can be a powerful tool in a filmmaker’s arsenal, but shaping an entire short film around one is no small feat. In their genre-bending short Uncle Morris, Victor Tadashi Suarez and Max Azulay take a well-intentioned speech – delivered by the title character at a baby shower – and spin it into a dark comedy exploring “the sometimes cultish world of millennial parenthood.”
“We never wanted the audience to feel too comfortable or certain about what genre we were in”
When Suarez and Azulay first conceived Uncle Morris, Suarez was on the cusp of fatherhood himself, naturally drawn to questions of how such a life-altering moment might reshape him. For Azulay, however, the motivation to make the short was rooted more in developing his craft as a filmmaker: “the film really came from being interested in a very specific acting and writing challenge: using a monologue as the engine of a story. It also felt like an interesting and dynamic idea to use the twists and turns of a monologue as a way to dictate changes in tone, genre and mood.”
“We never wanted the audience to feel too comfortable or certain about what genre we were in,” Suarez reveals. On that front, the filmmakers clearly succeeded. So often while watching a film, you find yourself trying to anticipate where it’s heading – but with Uncle Morris, it’s nearly impossible to predict the destination. Just when it seems poised to devolve into a public display of one-upmanship, Morris’ confession steers it into darker territory, before the short veers toward full-blown horror – “like you’re riding a crazy spiral inside someone’s panic attack,” as Suarez describes it.
“We wanted that vintage low-fi look of 16mm to match the handmade texture of the world we were inhabiting in the film” – the directors discussing the aesthetic of their short
Yet despite the unusual terrain Uncle Morris crosses, the film remains strikingly relatable. Morris embodies that all-too-familiar feeling of being the outsider at a social gathering, never quite fitting in. “It’s about the horror of a certain strange social dynamic that is hard to put into words,” Azulay explains, describing how he hopes audiences connect with the film. In Uncle Morris, that discomfort is pushed to an extreme, but its core stems from a universal experience: being trapped in situation where you dig yourself a hole you can’t climb out of.
Filmed in Suarez’s Echo Park backyard over the course of a single day, the duo turned to 16mm to capture what they call a “vintage lo-fi look.” With only six rolls of film to cover a nine-minute short, they restricted themselves to just two takes per shot. Add to that what they describe as a “stupidly small crew,” and the production might have seemed impossibly constrained. Yet Uncle Morris stands as proof of how much can be achieved with limited resources – distinctive, memorable, and, above all, a lot of fun.