Au Gratin opens the way a lot of real family gatherings do: chaotically.
Ericka (Tiffany Daniels), the youngest of the siblings, gets to her mother’s house first. She goes to wake her mom up and realizes something’s wrong, maybe seriously wrong. And before she can even get a full sentence out about it, the rest of the family starts showing up, and suddenly the house is loud and nobody’s listening to anybody.
Anyone who grew up in a big, chaotic family will recognize this immediately. The way conversations just talk over each other. The way something important can get buried under everyone else’s noise without anyone meaning for that to happen. It doesn’t feel written so much as remembered.
There’s a smaller, quieter story running underneath all that noise too, and it’s about being seen. Ericka actually went to culinary school. She’s the only one in the family with real training. And what does she get put on? Potatoes. Au gratin. Nobody trusts her with anything else, despite her being the most qualified person in the kitchen, and that says a lot about where she sits in this family. Capable, but somehow still not fully trusted.
It goes a little deeper than that, actually. Ericka’s the only one who saw her mother that morning, and she doesn’t tell anyone what she saw. So she’s sitting on this huge, stressful secret while her older siblings are cracking jokes, bossing each other around, doing the usual sibling stuff, completely unaware. That contrast, her carrying something heavy while everyone else stays light, is probably the most interesting thing the film is doing.
Where it loses me a little is the pacing right after that opening scene. The family moves from the kitchen to the table like nothing happened, and there’s never really a moment where anyone stops and goes, wait, is Mom okay? It gets mentioned, sort of, and then it’s chalked up to her just being asleep and everyone moves on. That’s the part that needed more room to breathe. Not a ton more, maybe just a few extra minutes, but enough to actually sit in that tension before rushing past it.
I don’t think the film is going for a gut punch, to be clear, and honestly that’s fine. It’s a comedy first, and a genuinely funny one. It could even go further into the chaos and I don’t think it would break anything. But you can tell there’s more story here than 11 minutes can hold. It feels like the beginning of something bigger.
Which is kind of exactly what I think this is: a proof of concept for a feature. Give me a full-length version of this family and I’m there. There’s real material in the sibling dynamics, the secret-keeping, the pecking order, all of it.
I also just want to say, we don’t get a lot of these. A Black family ensemble comedy, holiday chaos, kitchen disasters, a cast this good (Loretta Devine, Tiffany Daniels, Malynda Hale, Jay Donnell, Euriamis Losada, Michael Welch, Marley Soleil, Howard Cross IV) doesn’t come around that often, and this one earns its spot just by existing. It also handles its mixed family dynamics with a light touch instead of making a whole thing out of it, which I appreciated.
6.5 out of 10. Funny, warm, feels lived in, just needs about five more minutes to really land the punch it’s clearly capable of.
Selected Short Film, Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival
Runtime: 11 minutes, 22 seconds
Directed by Malynda Hale, Written by John Volk
Cast: Loretta Devine, Tiffany Daniels, Malynda Hale, Jay Donnell, Euriamis Losada, Michael Welch, Marley Soleil, and Howard Cross IV