From Omeleto.
A man tries to avoid a laughing plague.
SARDINIA is used with permission from Paul Kowalski. Learn more at https://linktr.ee/sardiniafilm.
Ryszard is a serious Polish-American man, a husband and a son who works in a dour office. When a contagious epidemic of uncontrollable laughter befalls the world, Ryszard becomes immune, exacerbating his already acute feelings of isolation and difference.
As the epidemic escalates, Ryszard watches as society becomes more dysfunctional. And when his cheerful wife is stricken, his sadness becomes a palpable grief for a world that’s rapidly changing.
Directed and written by Paul Kowalski and executive produced by Patton Oswalt, this striking and satirical short drama charts the travails of a man who finds himself at odds with the society surrounding him. For Ryszard, part of that alienation is his innate temperament, which is somber and weighty. But his sense of being an outsider becomes starker when the world succumbs to an epidemic of laughter, paralyzing and numbing him as society reorganizes itself to adapt.
Opening with the arrival of a parrot’s arrival in the U.S. and then shifting to a scene of Ryszard having breakfast with his wife Hilary laughing at the comics in the newspaper, the film immediately strikes a surreal, uncanny tone that immerses us in a feeling of unease, aided by a mournfully elegiac musical score and elegantly alienated visuals. That singularity of tone sustains itself as the narrative traces the slow breakdown of society as the laughter epidemic spreads. As people laugh at anything and everything, Ryszard grows alarmed.
The storytelling has a dark humor, found not in verbal wit or jokes but in irony and satire. Its world-building — featuring a brilliant inversion of traditional dystopian tropes where people are punished for not conforming to hysteria — is precise, clever and remarkable, envisioning a society conforming to "sadness protocols" and downing depressants to keep the laughter at bay. Within this inverted order of things, the collective cast of actors — featuring the collective talents of Philip Ettinger, Martha Plimpton and Breeda Wool — keep the narrative grounded in relatable human emotion, even as the world they exist in becomes increasingly off-kilter, even surreal. Aghast at what the world has become, Ryszard’s growing anxiety highlights the alienation experienced by those who resist mass movements or dominant ideologies.
Beautifully crafted, intellectually irreverent and thought-provoking, SARDINIA — which was long-listed for an Oscar — is like a modern Kafka fable for our times, offering up an unsettling reflection on real-world crises like pandemics, political polarization, and the erosion of rational discourse. Yet humanity’s drive towards joy and laughter remains, despite society’s attempts to stamp it out. As Ryszard’s father observes, "Life is a beautiful circus," a truth that becomes even more poignant in the film’s final scenes, where tragedy and laughter commingle and then culminate in an unforgettable final sequence. It might be the only fitting response in a world that mandates suffering and sadness, meeting collective insanity with an equally unmeasured response.
