Opening Up at the End of the World: Little Doors Film Review
Still from Little Doors. Photo courtesy of the Calgary Underground Film Festival.
It is very rare to see a film that occupies its own tone and world. Most things in 2026 are a copy of a copy, always riffing on something. In his feature directorial debut, the great Anthony Oberbeck has written and directed something that is alternatively funny, moving and surprisingly romantic that you will not shake once the film ends, as only the best art achieves.
The film, shot in Baltimore working alongside the Baltimore Filmmakers Collective, stars Megan Koester (in this author’s opinion, one of the funniest, most singular voices in comedy and most brilliant writers alive today), who we meet in the film living in a big house by herself, in the midst of the apocalypse happening. She meets a locksmith (played by Oberbeck), the two of them slowly hit it off and become romantic. In the midst of this romance, Koester’s character notices a little door growing on the side of her body, and well, that’s all I want to say about the plot, as it's best left experienced on your own. Oberbeck and Koester are married in real life, and if you know a bit of their real life story (which was documented on Koester’s essential Substack) you can sense little lovely romantic nods, which could only come from making a film with your partner. That said, do not take that as this thinking it will be cloying or saccharine. Little Doors is very much its own story, a film about being closed off and once another person enters your life, you adopt certain personality traits and open yourself up more leading to a richer life, which operates on its own gentle and sweet rhythms (those rhythms being scored by the genius Lars Finberg of The Intelligence, bringing keyboard-and-horn-based-menace to the proceedings).
Anthony Oberbeck is primarily known as a comedy actor/writer/director, best known for 2023’s hilarious Dad & Step-Dad (co-written and co-starring Colin Burgess, and co-written and directed by Tynan DeLong) and the Reveries series with Matt Barats and Graham Mason (which culminated in 2025’s Reveries: The Mind Prison, which had its world premiere at last year’s Calgary Underground Film Festival), and through his work has become one of the most dependable, exciting voices in not just comedy filmmaking but filmmaking as a whole. With Little Doors, Oberbeck is, to borrow a title from the Reveries series, going deeper, using the language of absurdist comedy filmmaking, while reaching for deeper emotional truths.
Little Doors will definitely make you laugh, but that is not its primary aim. Oberbeck’s northstar in making the film was the work of Finnish directing great Aki Kaurismäki (Fallen Leaves, Drifting Clouds, Leningrad Cowboys Go America) and you can sense elements of Kaurismäki’s work in Little Doors: the deadpan comedy, the minimalism, the warmth and humanism centred around characters who are just trying to survive in a capitalist hellscape that is literally burning down in front of their eyes. Do not take this as a Kaurismäki cover version though, as referenced above, Oberbeck uses his own distinct skillset brandished from the comedy world and his interest in outsider weirdo filmmaking godheads like John Waters to make a film that feels like a real culmination, the next chapter in one of the most exciting voices in indie filmmaking today.