Vague Visages’ Woche der Kritik essay contains spoilers. This article covers Beautiful and Neat Room (2025), Worry Time (2026) and Fiction Contract (2025). Check out more VV film essays at the home page.

There is a tendency to rely on meta-fiction in experimental film, mainly because it allows for fourth walls to be broken and affords room for erasing the line between reality and fiction. I often think of this as a cop-out because it is rarely done well. Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami is probably the most successful modern filmmaker to achieve this type of “pulling of the curtain,” but with less talented or new filmmakers, it often ends up being used as a convenient crutch when one is out of ideas. Hardly does it ever come off as clever as something like Charlie Kaufmann’s Adaptation (2002). This year, Woche der Kritik featured a number of filmmakers employing meta-fictional trickery with varying degrees of interest or success as characters create fictional simulations within the reality of the film. 

Maria Petschnig’s Beautiful and Neat Room takes place in a singular location — an apartment in New York City. Marie (Charlotte Aubin), a Dutch/German resident and a quasi-stand-in for the director, looks for someone to sublet an extra bedroom in her place — a very common practice. As she goes through various candidates and eventual renters, the audience can understand not only Marie’s restrictions and triggers, but also the cornucopia of human behavior that is almost universal in roommate interactions. Beautiful and Neat Room traverses these various ticks and icks in a surprisingly nuanced way, as the film allows the audience to develop preconceived notions about individuals — the way many people subconsciously do about potential renters and roommates, something Marie’s therapist (Mark Bracich) calls “trusting your gut.”

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The variance of these experiences shape the audience’s view of the roommates and Marie. Aubin’s character gets along with others well, and viewers can relate to the boundaries of her private work as an artist. Sometimes, Marie comes across as cruel and abrupt in her contempt of people’s personal spaces, like when she enters a new renter’s room more than once (while they are away) and touches things without asking first. She even secretly records one of the roommates from outside of his door, perhaps for one of her art video projects. Beautiful and Neat Room addresses the concept of performance-in-therapy as well. Marie’s psych sessions become a place for her to vent but also showcase the “serious” nature of her work. Her uncompromising personality allows for a chance to establish a baseline with her therapist, who winces at the protagonist’s stubbornness.

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Beautiful and Neat Room is about performance. What roommates communicate in private spaces and how they behave in company becomes an examination of simulation and performance, from simple white lies to nefarious and even criminal violations of each other. Some roommates are just minor nuisances, like a young woman tenant (Erica Sarda as Niki) who complains about the apartment’s cold temperature and keeps a heating fan on 24/7 that raises the apartment’s electricity bill. As Brad, Adam Ratcliffe portrays the most disturbing roommate of them all; a divorced man who works in an art studio and covertly takes salacious photos of Ashley and masturbates to them. 

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Worry Time (2026), a story about woman’s suffocating experience while making her first film, takes the idea of trials and performance into much more literal terms by being a “film about a film.” Admittedly, this is one of my least favorite genres of independent cinema, mainly because it explores the ambiguity between fact and fiction — a gimmick that director Tom Brennan also uses in Worry Time. Viewers are supposed to question’s the film’s reality and must wait in anticipation of the “cut” or pullback to reveal a different rehearsal for the focal movie production — an easy and overused way to add suspense when one is out of real ideas. Luckily, the crux of Worry Time is much more interesting than its structural tricks. 

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Like Marie in Beautiful and Neat Room, Worry Time’s Annette (portrayed by screenwriter Emma Paetz) is a very layered character who deals with hang-ups across various scenarios. Old white men produce her movie (which is vaguely about sexual and reproductive paranoia, the result of a culture that continually makes women feel insecure), and they repeat corporate detritus on Zoom calls that misinterpret the film’s feminist angle via exceedingly sexualized and profane critiques. In addition, the men Annette works with on set, both straight and gay, tend to speak over her and hijack ideas/decisions for the film. Yes, the protagonist feels dominated, even intimidated by all of the male figures demanding to take control of her creative concepts, but Annette is also someone whose need for control spills over to her female co-star, Viv (Afsaneh Dehrouyeh). The intensity of the overall acting, from Paetz to all the supporting players, feels very “theatre kids doing a movie” and over-expressive, evidenced by unfinished sentences and half-ideas. But when Brennan’s performers create moods of misunderstanding and claustrophobia on the film set, the director hits those emotions right on the head. 

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If Worry Time isn’t literal enough about its experimentation with “roles,” then Carolyn Lazard’s short film Fiction Contract (2025) makes everything as explicit as possible. The movie takes place at a hospital pregnancy ward where a tech-enabled mannequin simulates the worries, pain and uncertainties of a Black mother giving birth, with the nurses treating the simulation like a live delivery. The premise, along with an all-Black cast, highlights a reality about mortality rates among Black infants which are 91 percent higher than infants of other races in the United States. The cinematography makes viewers acutely aware of these tragic facts and thus poses an important question — is the delivery going to result in a healthy baby? By switching between the delivery room and the woman simulating the voice of the birthing mother, Lazard makes it explicitly clear that the complex simulation was devised to bond the nurses with the patient. The trials in fiction help fortify and reassure the experiment’s success.

Soham Gadre (@SohamGadre) is a writer/filmmaker based in Washington, D.C. He has contributed to publications such as Bustle, Frameland and Film Inquiry. Soham is currently in production for his first short film. All of his film and writing work can be found at extrasensoryfilms.com.

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