Toronto After Dark 2025 Short Film Short Review: CLOWN SONG Is A Banger

The sinister clown is a timeless trope of cinema and pulp horror and real life - from David Lynch to Rob Zombie, Álex de la Iglesia to Bobcat Goldthwait, and Stephen King to John Wayne Gacy.

Taking the ever-loving piss out of all of this comes Brady Dowad and Steve M. Robertson with their short film hybrid music video, Clown Song, which manages to encapsulate twenty-something aimlessness, buried childhood memories, the circle of life, rage, revenge, purgatorial comeuppance, the consequences of becoming what you hate, and of course, the deep philosophy of the clown.

With a catchy post-punk nasal power-ballad, seemingly plucked right out of 1999 (think Blink-182’s What’s My Age Again?) they sugar coat, or rather, add sprinkles to, a profoundly uncomfortable situation, reframing it into a happy, toe-tappy, little karmic tragedy. One that you could hum to yourself on the bus.

Effectively compact, with cheeky visual grammar, lighting, and slick camera-work, Clown Song manages, quite effortlessly so, several rug-pulls around emotional catharsis, generational trauma, and more than one dose of naughty sex -- all within the span of 7 minutes.

It is an infectious and charming whirlwind, that should not work, but does, impossibly so, that it is difficult to believe this is a debut film effort. It is so good, and fun-when-it-shouldn’t be, that you may never look at clowns (or doughnuts) in the same way again.

Encore! Encore. Give these guys a feature.