A Grief Encounter (2026)
Every so often a short comes along with a premise so neat you wonder why no one had done it before, and A Grief Encounter is one of those. James Ashley McLaren's Australian short is a funny, tender and genuinely original little film about a lonely taxidermist and the grieving widower who walks into her shop, and it wrong-foots you in the loveliest way. I am giving it three and a half stars, and I came away wanting far more of it.
The setup is a small comic gem. Adrienne, our taxidermist, is working away one ordinary day when a man comes in and tells her he "needs to stuff someone". She gets entirely the wrong end of the stick and takes it as a clumsy, rather forward bit of flirting, when what poor Herb actually means is his late wife. It is a beautifully judged misunderstanding, awkward and funny and a little mortifying, and it sets the whole film off on exactly the right foot.
From there it deepens into something more touching than you expect. As the two of them talk, Adrienne, and we, learn more about Herb and the woman he has lost: her fear of flying, her fear of swimming, the small terrors that shrank her world. And then the detail that quietly breaks your heart, the list she left him of things to do after she was gone, "make new friends" among them. It turns a daft comic premise into a real and generous meditation on grief, on loneliness, and on the nudges the dead leave to push the living back out into the world.
It helps enormously that the two leads are so good. Deborah Mailman is wonderful as Adrienne, all prickly solitude slowly thawing, and Wayne Blair's Herb is gentle and quietly devastated, and the pair strike up a lovely, hesitant chemistry. You find yourself rooting for them, genuinely wanting to know what becomes of these two, whether that tentative connection turns into something more by the end. That I was left wanting to follow them further is the surest sign of how much the film won me over.
Three and a half stars. A Grief Encounter is a warm, witty and unexpectedly moving short that mines real feeling from a wonderfully silly idea, carried by two terrific performances. It is over almost too soon, and I would happily have spent far longer in Adrienne's shop, but as a small, perfectly formed thing about love and loss it is a delight. Seek it out.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country Australia: Chopper (2000), Mad Max 2 (1981), Talk to Me (2022)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More comedy: Lady (2026), Comédie-Française (2026), The Devil Is In Me (2026)
