There’s something wonderfully unpretentious about Armstrong, the nine-minute comedy that premiered in August 2025. Director Dylan Hare created a short film that doesn’t overthink itself—it simply takes a straightforward premise and runs it into the ground with the kind of dark humor that makes you laugh even when you’re wincing. A country guy with big dreams moves to Sydney, and within 24 hours, everything goes catastrophically wrong. By the end, he’s in a hospital bed fighting for his life. It’s the kind of story that could easily become maudlin, but Hare keeps it light and absurd instead.
The film received a 5.5/10 rating from 2 votes, which tells you something important: this is a project that found its audience, even if that audience is small. That’s actually the right way to think about short films in 2025. They’re not competing for box office dollars or awards season momentum. They’re experiments, proof of concepts, and sometimes just pure creative expression. Armstrong is the latter—a brief, punchy piece of work that knows exactly what it wants to be and commits fully to that vision.
What makes Hare’s direction effective is his restraint. The film could have milked every moment of the protagonist’s suffering for cheap laughs, but instead it moves at a brisk pace. At 9 minutes minutes, there’s no room for fat. Every scene exists to either advance the narrative or add another layer to the absurdity. The film doesn’t linger on pathos when it can cut to something worse happening instead. That’s a comedic instinct—knowing when to move on, when the joke has landed, when to let the audience catch up.
The ensemble works well together too. Dylan Hare stars alongside Simon Elrahi and Stephanie Panozzo, and what’s apparent is a genuine chemistry between them. They move through the material without winking at the camera, which is essential for this kind of humor. If the characters acknowledged how ridiculous everything is becoming, the comedy would collapse. Instead, they treat each disaster as if it’s just another Tuesday, which is exactly what makes it funny.
> There’s an efficiency to short-form filmmaking that long-form cinema often lacks. You can’t afford unnecessary scenes or character development that doesn’t serve the story. Every frame counts.
In terms of what Armstrong means for Australian comedy cinema specifically, it’s part of a broader tradition of filmmakers using dark humor to explore themes of aspiration and disappointment. There’s DNA here connected to the Australian sensibility that produced films like those in Gillian Armstrong’s catalog—works that understand the gap between dreams and reality. Hare doesn’t have the resources or runtime to develop his themes as deeply, but the instinct is similar: take an ordinary person, put them in an impossible situation, and see what happens.
The production itself came from HAVAYARN, and whether the budget was modest or generous, the results suggest filmmakers who understood their constraints and worked within them. That’s always been the secret to good short films—not trying to be a feature film, but embracing what short films do better:
- Immediacy: No time for setup, so you jump straight into the conflict
- Focus: One clear narrative arc instead of subplots and tangents
- Commitment: The joke lands or it doesn’t—there’s no second act to recover in
- Experimentation: You can take bigger creative risks in nine minutes than you can in 90
Where Armstrong might struggle in the broader conversation about cinema is simply in reach and visibility. Short films don’t generate box office revenue. They don’t drive awards season conversations in the same way features do. The current 5.5 reflects a small voting pool, and that’s typical for this format. Most people who watch shorts do so because they’re specifically seeking them out—at festivals, on streaming platforms, or through personal recommendations. Armstrong isn’t a film you stumble upon casually.
Yet that’s also its strength. It exists outside the commercial pressures that shape so much of contemporary filmmaking. Hare didn’t need to compromise his vision for market appeal. He didn’t need to add a romantic subplot or soften the ending or make the protagonist more sympathetic. He could make exactly the film he wanted to make, and that kind of creative freedom is increasingly rare.
The dark comedy tradition in Australia has always had a particular edge—maybe it’s something about the national character, or maybe it’s just that Australian filmmakers have never been overly concerned with being liked. Armstrong fits comfortably into that lineage. It’s a film about failure and bad luck, but it’s told with genuine affection for its protagonist and a willingness to find humor in the darkest moments. That balance is harder to achieve than it looks.
As we move through the latter half of the 2020s, shorts like this one matter because they remind us that cinema doesn’t require massive budgets or theatrical releases to be worth watching. They matter because they prove that simple premises, well-executed, can be genuinely entertaining. And they matter because they’re often where the next generation of filmmakers develops their voice before moving on to bigger projects. Whether Dylan Hare continues in this direction or uses Armstrong as a springboard to feature filmmaking, what matters is that he made something that works. In a landscape crowded with expensive, complicated productions, sometimes that’s enough.
