SXSW featured quite a number of short films across a variety of genres and I wanted to highlight three that focused on unconventional love that I found utterly bizarre and surprisingly charming.

Stuffed

Up first is the most genre-specific of the three short films and easily the best. Stuffed opens on a lonely Taxidermist (Alison Fitzjohn) working diligently on her latest taxidermied animal. Her previous work surrounds her, hanging from the walls and perched just so. And while she’s enraptured with her work, she wants something more. She desires a human to stuff and mount; a person she can save from the process of aging, yes. But also, it seems, a companion who will live with her forever. So she goes online to solicit a volunteer and when Bernie (Anthony Young) shows up, she might have gotten more than she bargained for. She might be falling in love.

Oh…did I mention that Stuffed is also a musical?

Dramatic organ music accompanies the title and, in true musical fashion, the Taxidermist sings her innermost desires and fears, telling us, “Nothing is fixed and nothing can stay. Preserving life’s my goal, my art.” And when she posts her requests online in a forum, their responses smartly become a choir of confusion and repulsion until Bernie’s voice cuts through the cacophony. It’s a wonderfully staged moment in a short film filled with absurdities.

Beyond all the gross taxidermy talk and the violence, Stuffed is about two incredibly sad and lonely people who feel as if the world has left them behind. One’s willing to give up his life to be preserved forever because he’s so lonely; the other never thought love was possible. And somehow, it’s weirdly romantic in the most absurdly gross way. The music’s great, as well.

Squeegee

Continuing with surrealism and lonely people, Morgan Krantz’s Squeegee tells the story of a high-powered business woman named Lori (Amy Rutherford) who blows off an important meeting for an erotic tryst with a Window Washer (Blair McKenzie). The most joke-like and, honestly, funny of the trio of short films, Squeegee works because of how committed Amy Rutherford is to pantomiming her sexual desires against a sheet of glass in a high-rise office building.

The way she initially ignores the Window Washer, her back to the window in anticipation, to the way she slowly turns around, her tongue sticking out until it’s hanging like a dog in front of her. The Window Washer repeating her movements in motion. The way she presses her hands on her thighs mixed with his fingers on the glass as she presses against it. The pantomimed kisses and sexual acts, played out with a sheet of glass between. It feels like an appropriate metaphor for a year of isolation, where a lot of people have resorted to online communications and forced separations.

Squeegee is deeply funny and ends on such a surprisingly hilarious moment of panic that also highlights the divide between class and the way the rich uses the worker class as a means to an end.

Puss

Rounding out this trio of absurd tours down love’s canal, is a more obvious (yet somehow more bizarre) look at desperately wanting human connection in a world of pandemics.

Samantha (Sarah Ellen Stephens) has been alone for too long. Puss opens with a title card explaining that she is currently on “Day 168 of the pandemic” and, more importantly, “Day 99 of Samantha’s Isolation.” Not to put too fine a point on it, she’s horny. She wants a good fuck but finds it increasingly difficult, considering she’s quarantined alone in her apartment.

So she texts a bunch of people (including Cubby’s Mark Blane) hoping someone will risk breaking quarantine. She greets a delivery man in her underwear and ponders out loud what his lips look like under the mask. Meanwhile everything she watches sounds sexual, as two people discussing cooking discuss being a “master baster” and mention drizzling liquids all over. Her vibrator is getting a workout and has become banal..so she becomes increasingly desperate to get off.

“Puss” takes on different meanings in writer/director Lean Shore’s very odd and surreal homage to wanting to get off during a global pandemic. It goes in absurd directions, particularly in the end, and I’m not completely sure what to make of it. But kudos to Sarah Ellen Stephens who goes for gusto in her performance and really commits to the nonsensical and awkward humor.