From Omeleto.
Two friends plan revenge.
GOOD LUCK F-CK FACE is used with permission from Oli Beale. Learn more at https://olibeale.com.
Zara’s famous husband is cheating on her, and he has gotten the "other woman" pregnant. So Zara meets up with her friend Aimee to plan his downfall: they’re going to post something horrible on his currently unlocked social media account to derail his reputation and career.
The friends sit in a pub together, trying to come up with the perfectly devastating missive to make Zara’s husband look awful. Impugning the royal family? Slagging off popular heroes? Nothing is off the table as the pair scheme. But as they work together, they discover they’re not quite on the same page about many issues and learn new things about one another.
Directed and written by Oli Beale, this witty, barbed short dramedy is a story of vengeance and revenge, but instead of physical violence, the weapons are seemingly careless words lobbed like a hand grenade in the arena of public opinion. Zara wants to get her cheating husband canceled through his social media accounts, and she’s enlisted her best friend Aimee to come up with something they can post under his name.
Such a set-up allows the film to explore the intricacies of social media, "cancel culture" and the pieties of modern life, and the deft, air-tight writing revels in this vein of socially observant, savage wit, especially as the two friends hammer out the post. The long-running friendship between the women encourages a reckless "say anything" unguardedness between them. But even as the writing folds in clever and sometimes very funny references to contemporary issues, the women surprise one another with the darkness or ludicrousness of their suggestions. These two friends, it seems, don’t know one another as well as they think.
As Zara and Aimee work together, this friendship comes into focus as they find themselves not quite on the same page. As Aimee and Zara, respectively, actors Fiona Button and Leila Farzad are excellent, with a crackling rapport that indicates a long-running relationship. But as the moment of reckoning approaches and they hit upon the perfect way to destroy Zara’s husband in the court of public opinion, that tight bond shows its cracks.
GOOD LUCK F-CK FACE showcases, in many ways, the unique strengths of the short film format. Its agile, darkly funny writing and performances, tight visual set-up and brisk pacing truly shine in a compressed narrative scope, especially when delivered with such confident storytelling ability and rhythms. It knows just when to pause to note a fleeting but genuine emotion; it knows to amp up the comic timing when it hits on a smart, ironic riff. It may seem modest at first glance, but it reveals a savage audacity, building up intrigue and suspense until it deploys a perfectly understated but devastating zinger of an ending that will leave viewers marveling at the subtle, quietly icy impact of a perfectly leveraged revenge.
