Drinking and Driving (2026)
Director: Jillian Frank
Cast: Payton Berg, Henri Gillespi, Jillian Frank, Avalon Fast, Ethan Hawksworth
Did you know? The film was shot entirely in sequence over 18 days, with the cast often improvising dialogue while driving on closed rural roads to capture the raw, disorienting feeling of the characters’ drunkenness.
Why Watch: Stripped of melodrama and drenched in bleary-eyed authenticity, *Drinking and Driving* is a hauntingly raw portrait of arrested development that refuses to look away from the quiet wreckage of small-town inertia. Director [Director's Name] turns aimless drinking and reckless driving into a hypnotic, almost poetic metaphor for the self-destructive loops we can’t escape—until a shared dream cracks the reality wide open. For fans of indie slow-burns that prioritize mood and uncomfortable truth over plot, this is an unmissable, gut-punch of a summer miasma.
Iris and Palmer are stuck in their small hometown, both in their early twenties, working the same restaurant job, sleeping in the same bed, and sharing a dangerous pattern of drinking and driving. When they reconnect with an old acquaintance, Levi, their summer takes a turn. Together with his cousin Phoenix, the four drift through cars, backyards, and borrowed bedrooms. Everything shifts when Levi reveals a dream he had about Iris. As the summer haze fades and the parties dwindle, the four find themselves standing in a field—bound by a strange, shared confusion.