Slamdance 2022 Film Festival – There’s a lot to take in with the new short Your Houseplants Are Screaming. Filmmaker Benjamin Roberds presents 7 minutes of glorious hell that forces us to wonder what life is like for the common houseplant. The short mixes various techniques including stop motion animation, puppetry, and tells the story of two plants atop a mantle in a home who watch the creature that cares for them. The result is an existential fever dream that is densely packed with eye-popping visuals and comical metaphors that will leave you both perplexed and grossed out.

What makes Roberds‘ short work is how clearly he has fleshed out the concepts of role reversal between plants and humans. Fundamentally the roles have been reversed. The flesh-based “plants” sit on a mantle made of bones in a house constructed from muscle, sinew, and various body tissues. The creature caring for the “plants” is a wiry, moss-covered figure of vegetation who seems to move at a glacial pace. The older of the two “plants” explains how things are, how time moves much faster for them than it does their host, and how just outside the tooth-lined windows there is a flesh-forest where all “plants” are allowed to grow free. Everything is fine until the younger of the two mantle-dwellers gets unnerved by how close the mossy figure gets to them and decides to act out.

Your Houseplants Are Screaming is hilarious and disturbing to be sure but it might be a little too odd for some. Roberds, who also stars as the two plants, really leans into brutal campiness that will either win you over or repulse you. Regardless the piece takes viewers to a madhouse world where up is down, left is right, and plants are flesh and I gotta give Roberds props for such a gutsy concept and realized execution.

8 Out of 10