Sundance 2024 Film Festival –The Bleacher is a strange, mesmerizing, and haunting animated short. It depicts one woman’s nervous breakdown and anxiety through a bizarre trip, all involving a washing machine.

Directed by Nicole Daddona and Adam Wilder, the short features a character named Rita, aka The Bleacher, voiced by Kate Micucci. Rita loses a sock in the washing machine at Frugal Wash. She nearly crawls in the machine, and from there, is sucked into a strange, sometimes nightmarish journey. There’s a singing dolphin, a few face-melting sequences, and plenty of other bizarre images. This short is a bit difficult to classify, but it certainly has horror elements.

There’s also something uncanny and unsettling about the setting. Anyone who has been in a laundromat, especially late at night, knows how seedy and shady such a place can be. This is captured well in the short’s opening minute or two, when everything is seen from Rita’s perspective, as she carries a bottle of bleach at her side. There’s a couple making out atop of one of the washing machines, a woman scowling and covering something that’s likely obscene on her laptop, and posters warning against porn. It all makes for quite an effective use of tone and setting and establishes the weirdness that follows.

The animation by Barney Abrahams looks really gnarly, especially some of the face-melting sequences. It makes for an unforgettable trip through Rita’s twisted subconscious. Overall, The Bleacher takes a familiar location and turns it into something abnormal and warped. This makes for a wild eight minutes.

8 Out of 10