A Twist of Hate (2026)
There is a very particular pleasure in a short film that knows exactly what it is and does it well, and A Twist of Hate, Madeleine Shenai's nine-minute short film, is a neat little example. I caught it at the BFI London Film Festival, and while it is slight by design it is also sharp, funny and beautifully performed. Three stars, and an easy, enjoyable three at that.
The premise is almost entirely a conceit for a single scene. A happily married couple sit down with a lawyer, expecting something routine, and instead find themselves being walked through an escalating series of ever more detailed and unlikely scenarios, what happens if one of them dies, then the other, then both, and who gets the money, the house, the children, in increasingly absurd permutations. It is essentially a sketch premise stretched to a short, and the fun is in watching a contented couple's certainties quietly curdle as the hypotheticals pile up and they start, almost against their will, to contemplate the validity of their own love.
It lives or dies on its dialogue and its cast, and happily both are strong. This is a talky piece, nearly all words, and the writing has a pleasing precision, each new scenario tightening the screw a little further. Tom Stourton and Sofia Barclay are good value as the couple, but it is Sally Phillips, a face I know well from years of British film and television, who really makes it tick as the lawyer. She delivers the escalating nonsense with such deadpan relish that she turns what could have been a one-joke premise into something genuinely very funny.
If it stays firmly in minor key, that is because it never really aspires to be anything more than a well-told comic riff, and I did not mind that at all. It is the sort of thing that would play a treat in a shorts programme and leave a room grinning, and it is a nice calling card for a writer-director with an obvious ear for a line.
Three stars. A Twist of Hate is funny, well written and expertly delivered, carried over the line by a lovely turn from Sally Phillips. It does not reach for the stars, but it does exactly what it sets out to do with real polish, and sometimes a sharp nine minutes that makes you laugh is quite enough.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Uk: Sweet Bitter Sweet (2026), The Sorrows of Young Charlotte (2026)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More comedy: Lady (2026), Please (2026), Micro Bangs (2026)
