the most human film ever made
One of the most liked comments on the YouTube upload of Jerry the Ginger Eater, Connor Storrie's 2025 short, reads: “I’m 6 months sober actually” said by a woman on her way to help a cannibal murder her boss. this is the most human film ever made.
The comment is a joke. It is also, accidentally, the correct critical response. What the film does in fifteen minutes is take a situation that has no business being human - a cannibal pulls a sex worker into a car and explains, in a calm register, that he is going to eat her - and resolves it, scene by scene, into something resembling the small negotiations adults make when they have decided to be in a working relationship with someone they met under conditions that would, in any other genre, have produced a corpse.
The opening is transactional. Jerry has already decided. Tweaker is already cornered. The first thing she does is correctly assess that rape is not the threat on offer - “Can you just rape me, please? I'd rather that” which is a terrible line read as a request and a brilliant one read as an actor's instinct about where the scene's actual dread is located. Rape would be survivable. Being eaten is not. The film's first joke is that the sex worker, trained by her profession to read men, reaches for the wrong frame first and has to recalibrate in real time.
What Tweaker then does, inside about ninety seconds of screen time, is negotiate herself out of being the meal and into being the scout. She offers up her boss. Her boss is a ginger. Jerry agrees. The film does not hurry past the bargain. It wants you to watch two people, one of whom was about to eat the other, settle with startling efficiency, into the shared project of eating someone else. One comment registers the move cleanly: the way she negotiates herself OUT of being eaten and INTO a business partnership in under 90 seconds. women in the workplace. This is a screwball premise performed flat. The comedy is the competence.
The central formal trick of the film is that its language for violence is also its language for intimacy. Tweaker, trying to read the domestic context, asks about his wife. There is a woman, he says. “We’re very close. We’re very, very, very close.” Where is she? “She’s inside of me. She’s deep inside of me.” For a beat, the line hovers in euphemism. Then it collapses into the literal. “I ate her.” The exchange is funny because the euphemism collapses into the literal. It is also - and the film knows this - the most honest depiction of a certain kind of romantic absorption available to a fifteen-minute short. “I was saying it so that I didn't have to say it, but yeah, I ate her.” The film’s central romantic proposition, spoken in the only language it has access to, is that love is the thing you cannot metabolise without consuming, and consumption is the thing you cannot do without losing the person consumed. But the joke only works because the film recognises that cannibalism is the only emotional vocabulary it has. It cannot describe love except as a form of catastrophic incorporation.
That is why the scene lands as more than absurdism. The confession does not merely parody romantic language; it exposes something real inside it. The fantasy of absolute closeness, of having someone fully inside one’s life, one’s body, one’s self, is pushed to a grotesque conclusion. The cannibal idiom is not a metaphor laid over the story from outside but the story’s native language for attachment, need, and loss.
Tweaker's counter-confession works by the same logic. She talks about meth. She talks about how much she liked it. “I'd wake up in the morning and just smoke meth and have the best fucking day in the world, but every day.” She talks about being skinny. “I looked like Kate Moss in the Molly, you know? She's like, oh, I look heroin chic." She talks about how her sweat bleached her clothes - “every piece of clothing I had looked like a Pollock painting" - and then, asked “Pollock?”, explains, “Jackson Pollock”. The joke inside the joke is that she reaches, casually, for Jackson Pollock as the simile for her meth-bleached clothes - the art history and the addiction sharing a single register, as though they operate on the same shelf of her memory. The addiction confession is calibrated exactly the way the cannibal confession is calibrated: a person naming a hunger that was larger than the world's ability to contain it, and trying to make the naming funny enough to survive. “I'm 6 months sober, actually.” None of this is framed as redemption. What matters is that Tweaker knows what it is to live under the rule of an appetite larger than the world can contain. She has survived the kind of hunger Jerry still inhabits.
What makes Jerry the Ginger Eater work as a film, rather than as an exercise, is that the two characters are looking at each other from opposite sides of the same thing. Jerry is an appetite with no stopping condition. Tweaker is an appetite that has been stopped, and is therefore available to watch what an unstopped one looks like. The middle of the film, once the premise is set, is basically the two of them in a car, talking. “If you're going to eat, I really want to eat too. I'm really hungry.[....] Diet Coke and fries.” The hunger has to be fed constantly; the question is only what register it gets fed in.
The viewers reaching for David Lynch are correct and slightly off. One of the more striking comparisons, tucked further down in the thread, is this: Gregg Araki and Gaspar Noé had a baby and that baby forgot to take its Adderall and went and made this film. The reference is closer to what Jerry is actually doing. Lynch is the aesthetic inheritance - the willingness to let the dream and the real occupy the same frame, the trust in image over plausibility. Araki is the structural inheritance - the road film about bodies wrong for the world they are crossing, the willingness to treat sex work and drug use and queer desire as simply present. The Doom Generation is a road film about three young people who begin killing and cannot stop, and it is also a love story. Mysterious Skin is a film about childhood trauma and adult sex work that refuses to let either register cancel the other out. Kaboom is a queer conspiracy comedy that treats paranoia as erotic. The Araki lineage is a lineage of films that take bodies the culture has no plan for and put them into narrative structures that also have no plan for them, and film the resulting collisions with unembarrassed affection. Jerry sits inside that lineage.
Storrie has mentioned meeting Araki in passing; he has not, from what I could find, named Araki's films as an influence on this short. Viewers are reaching for the comparison independently, which is what an actual lineage tends to look like from outside - a rhyme the audience registers before the artist ever declares it.
The Noé half of the comparison does different work. What matters there is less influence than discipline. The camera in Jerry does not flinch from physical consequence, but neither does it sensationalise it. It holds. It trusts faces, rhythms, and proximity. The result is that comedy and confession can coexist inside the same shot without either one being underlined. This is Noé-adjacent discipline. Saint Laurent Productions produced Noé's Lux Æterna - the part of the alignment with Storrie that travels publicly. Viewers independently reaching for Noé when describing Jerry is the confirmation that the alignment is real.
One comment, worth quoting in full, reads: a love story between emotionally unavailable cannibal and a lonely tweaker, our generation's When Harry Met Sally. The joke reads as wrong on first pass and right on second. When Harry Met Sally is a film about whether men and women can be friends. Jerry the Ginger Eater is a film about whether two people who should by all rights have killed each other can be functional working partners. Both films propose that the answer is yes, but only after the correct amount of friction. Both are, structurally, love stories in which the love is non-sexual and earned. The comment is doing real critical work: it names the film's genre. Jerry is a romantic comedy in which the romance has been displaced into friendship, and the comedy has been displaced into the body.
That is what makes the short more than a stylish provocation. It is about appetite, certainly: about the body in the wrong context, and about what it costs to be hungry in a world that does not know how to feed you. But it is also about the strange forms of mutual recognition that become possible when two people discover that their hungers, however differently lived, are legible to one another. The darkness is the route to the tenderness.
Which is why the top comment, silly as it is, finally turns out to be right. “This is the most human film ever made” is a joke only until the film has persuaded you otherwise. By the end, it has earned the line.