The Sorrows of Young Charlotte (2026)
There is a clever idea buried inside The Sorrows of Young Charlotte, Shir Ariya's dark comedy short film, which I caught in the BFI London Film Festival's Land of Hope and Gory strand. The title alone tells you the game, a gender-flipped riff on Goethe, with the pining Werther now the one nursing hopeless feelings, and for a while I was genuinely on board. By the end, though, something about it felt distinctly off, and I have to settle on two stars.
The setup is sharp enough. Charlotte, reeling from the end of a four-year relationship, sleeps with her male friend Werther more or less on a whim, and what is a one-off mistake for her turns out to be the uncorking of years of quietly hoarded longing for him. His confession curdles the morning after into an unnerving, darkly explosive argument, and the film is at its best in that queasy space where neither party is entirely in the right and the awkwardness has real teeth.
Then it goes where the programme's title promises. Werther, suffering a bout of what we might politely call stage fright, helps himself to the potency pills left behind by Charlotte's ex, takes a hearty double dose, and meets a grisly and extremely literal end when the whole thing quite spectacularly goes off. Meanwhile the ex picks that exact moment to call and try to win her back. As a piece of gross-out body horror the big set-piece is well staged, gleefully grim and easily the most memorable thing in it, and the cinema I was in certainly reacted.
My trouble is with what it all adds up to. A lot of the conversation around it leans into the toxic nice guy reading, the sense that Werther is getting a richly deserved comeuppance, and you can feel the film angling for that cheer. But it sits awkwardly with the actual scenario, because the pair of them made the decision to sleep together together, and punishing him so catastrophically for then having feelings tips the satire into something cruder and less honest than the smart premise deserved. It wants to be a provocation, yet it never quite earns the certainty it swaggers with.
Two stars. The Sorrows of Young Charlotte is confidently made and has one genuinely jaw-dropping gag, and I can see it playing like a dream in a rowdy shorts programme. But underneath the splatter the thinking is muddled, and the longer I sat with it the more its glee felt misdirected. A strong hook and a strong effect in search of a point worth making.
Related on Movies With Macca
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)
