WARNING - This Review Contains Spoilers

Under the Bed and Into the Void

My Roommate Dan is not your average roommate comedy.

It’s a surreal, slow-burn short that lures you in with quiet domesticity and leaves you questioning what just happened in the best way. Written and directed by Brian Mortensen and produced by Mortenveld Productions, the film rides the line between psychological metaphor and absurdist horror, blending deadpan humor with cosmic weirdness.

From the first plunky note of its opening axolotl bop (yes, really), the short charms you into its offbeat logic: a woman named Diane lives with Dan. Dan lives under her bed. Dan does not come out. Dan is, in her words, “just a really good friend.”

What starts as a quirky setup quickly unravels into something deeper - a metaphor-laden meditation on comfort, control, and coexisting realities. And with Marty, I’m Afraid’s dreamy, haunting soundtrack? You’re not crawling out of this rabbit hole any time soon.

We spoke to the director about doghouses, coffee pots, and the joys of bobbleheads. Let’s get into it.

The Setup is Unhinged (and We’re Obsessed)

We open on a coffee pot bubbling to life. Not exactly a horror cliché, but somehow, you know something’s coming. It’s domestic. It’s eerie. And it’s oddly tender.

Enter Diane, a woman who makes breakfast for two, pours two mugs of coffee, and places one portion gently on the floor beside her bed. There’s no one in the room. But there is a roommate. His name is Dan. And he lives under her bed.

Yes, you read that right.

In My Roommate Dan, we’re immediately thrown into a reality that plays by its own logic. Diane moves with calm, casual care. Her daily routine includes feeding a man who never shows his face and yet, nothing about her is frantic or disturbed. If anything, she’s the picture of emotional composure. She smiles, jokes, hosts her coworker Alan for pizza and beer like any other Tuesday night.

Except Alan is not ready for Dan. And that’s when the pressure builds.

In our exclusive interview, director Brian said the idea was born from “Snoopy’s dog house” - a place where an entire world exists inside something impossibly small. That whimsy-meets-weirdness tone is what makes Dan so unsettling and so funny.

The scene where Diane puts the tray on the floor and walks away, I thought that concept was hilarious.

The brilliance here is that the audience is left to question what’s real, what’s metaphor, and what’s just…Diane being Diane.

Is Dan a monster? A metaphor? An emotional dependency? A very polite basement goblin? Who knows. But when Alan - her slightly judgy but well-meaning coworker - pushes too hard to understand, that’s when things spiral.

Under her bed lies a black hole that Diane has already made peace with.

Descent Into the Void (and the Pizza Box Portal)

Alan thought he was just coming over for pizza. A casual night in with Diane. Maybe some low-stakes flirting. What he got instead?…

When Diane casually drops that she lives with someone named Dan, Alan tries to play it cool. Tries. But the more he hears - about Dan never leaving the room, never showing his face, only emerging when Diane’s asleep - the more his face tightens into a what the actual hell kind of stare.

Still, Diane keeps her cool. She’s not defensive, she’s matter-of-fact. Dan’s just shy. Dan respects her space. Dan’s been through a lot. “This is normal,” she insists, like someone describing a beloved houseplant or a very chill cryptid.

Eventually Alan cracks. The beer kicks in. The pizza’s gone. The vibes are weird. So he storms into Diane’s room and yells under the bed: “Get out from under there, Dan!”

Big mistake.

Instead of getting a look at Dan, Alan gets sucked into a swirling vortex of cosmic darkness. We’re talking full-on interdimensional travel. It’s part Twilight Zone, part Lynchian, and part Looney Tunes meets The Babadook.

And then…silence.

Days pass? Weeks? We’re not sure but Diane doesn’t seem rattled. She lies in bed. Dan tosses a box out from beneath her. Inside? A bobblehead of Alan.

Yes. A BOBBLEHEAD.

Diane tucks it away in her nightstand like it’s a souvenir. “Maybe keeping you there another year will teach you a lesson,” she mutters. “And don’t ask me for any more cookies.”

And just like that, My Roommate Dan cements itself as a modern cult classic: absurd, intimate, and disturbingly satisfying.

Beneath the Bed: Symbolism, Subtext & the Surreal Soul of My Roommate Dan

In My Roommate Dan, the story unfolds in what appears to be a quirky, awkward slice-of-life setup, but it quickly reveals itself to be something far more layered.

The director Brian explained,

Snoopy was a dog who had everything in a tiny dog house and we never got to look inside, so it was like another world existed down there.

That nostalgic touch gives way to something uncanny. Like Diane’s emotional detachment, the mundane details (a cup of coffee, a slice of pizza, a bobblehead) slowly take on an eerie weight. Every object becomes a breadcrumb - part of a breadcrumb trail that leads us to the film’s subconscious.

The Illusion of Normalcy

Diane, the soft-spoken protagonist, moves through her apartment in quiet routines: boiling water, setting the table, placing food gently on the floor beside her bed. It's deadpan. Awkward. Even a little charming. But it doesn’t take long before the viewer realizes something is off.

The silence lingers too long. The hallway is too dark. The boiling pot feels too loaded. And Dan? Dan never appears. He never speaks. Never shows his face. And yet he’s the gravitational center of every scene. Diane speaks about him the way you might speak about a deeply embedded trauma you’ve learned to normalize.

Calm. Assured. Controlled.

It’s this tension between tone and content that makes the film so disorienting and so brilliant.

The moment Alan starts poking holes in the logic, the discomfort rises. His questions mirror our own. As he expresses concern over Diane’s dynamic with Dan, the vibe shifts from “offbeat” to “ominous.”

Then Alan makes a fatal mistake: he looks under the bed. He is sucked into a cosmic vortex - a surreal wormhole that visually breaks the rules of the film up until that point. It’s jarring, unapologetic, and deeply symbolic. This is no longer a quirky character piece. This is a metaphysical spiral into repression, trauma, and the terrifying cost of disrupting a tightly held reality.

This is a story about control, compartmentalization, and portals to inner worlds we’re not meant to enter.

Dan as Projection: Split Selves and Subconscious Shelter

The name Dan might sound innocent at first. Generic. A blank slate. But when paired with Diane, it becomes too similar to ignore. Nearly an anagram. One syllable apart. Mirror images with just enough difference to suggest opposition - or fragmentation.

So what if Dan isn’t real? What if Dan is Diane? Or at least...a compartmentalized part of her. A repressed self. A container for something she’s unwilling or unable to integrate into her waking identity.

We all live in our own realities, and those realities exist within other realities.

Diane’s bedroom isn’t just a physical space, it’s a psychological map. A floor plan of her inner life. And under her bed? That’s the basement of the mind. The subconscious. The place where things go when they’re too painful, too wild, too strange to look at directly.

Dan doesn’t emerge. He doesn’t interact with others. He’s spoken for. And Diane? She’s the gatekeeper. The moderator. The caretaker. She feeds him, nurtures him, builds rules around him. But she also contains him - quite literally beneath the floorboards of her identity.

It’s a system of survival.

It mirrors the coping strategies of people navigating trauma, dissociation, or social masking. Diane has created a world in which she can function - professionally, romantically, socially - but it’s only possible because she’s exiled the parts of herself that don’t “fit.” Instead of banishing them completely, she’s hidden them, given them structure, and fed them routines.

Dan, in this reading, becomes everything Diane has compartmentalized: anxiety, grief, craving, softness, rage. She’s learned to coexist with it all…as long as it stays down there.

That’s why Alan’s intrusion is so dangerous. He doesn’t just challenge her story. He threatens to unseal a part of her she’s spent years organizing.

The Coffee Pot, Explained

At first glance, the film’s opening shot - a pot of water slowly coming to a boil - feels mundane, but in My Roommate Dan, nothing is just what it seems.

Director Brian revealed:

It is two worlds - the inside and the outside - and the pressure that builds between the two.

And suddenly, that bubbling pot becomes a perfect metaphor. Not just for Diane, but for the entire film.

Let’s break it down.

The coffee pot is transparent. We can see through it, but we can’t touch what’s inside. It’s containment - glass walls and controlled heat. Inside, the water roils, builds, simmers. On the outside, everything looks fine. Warm. Familiar. Manageable.

Sound familiar?

It mirrors Diane’s emotional structure - a carefully maintained exterior and a pressurized interior she refuses to acknowledge. She goes through the motions of daily life: working, dating, cooking breakfast for two. But all the while, something is heating beneath the surface.

That “something” is Dan.

The coffee pot also introduces us to the film’s core visual language: the tension between appearance and reality. The idea that we can live ordinary lives while extraordinary pressure brews just below and when it breaks, it won’t be subtle. It’ll be volcanic.

In Diane’s case, the eruption isn’t screaming, or sobbing, or spiraling. It’s a coworker getting sucked into a cosmic void.

That’s what makes the coffee pot so brilliant as an opening image. It doesn’t just foreshadow the film’s surreal turn, it is the surreal turn, in metaphor form. You just don’t know it yet.

It’s also a commentary on emotional labor.

Diane doesn’t just brew coffee for herself, she makes enough for two. She manages the needs of someone (or something) who doesn’t even appear. She’s administering the coffee - something many people rely on for a boost or quite literally cannot start their day without.

And the pot? That’s the unsung hero. The object doing all the work until it can’t anymore.

Diane the Architect

From the very first scene, Diane constructs a reality where Dan’s subterranean existence isn’t weird, it’s normalized. Diane doesn’t try to convince us that Dan is real in a physical sense. She convinces us that Dan makes sense. That this arrangement is functional.

That we are the weird ones for questioning it.

When Alan, her coworker, starts poking holes in her constructed world, she doesn’t panic.

She reassures him. Jokes with him. Deflects. Diffuses. And when that doesn’t work? Diane doesn’t cry. She lets Dan handle it.

Which brings us to that final scene - the one that redefines the entire film.

Alan is gone. No fanfare. No rescue attempt. Just…gone. Reduced to a bobblehead tossed from beneath the bed like a package from another realm.

She calmly picks it up, examines it like a file folder, and slides it into her nightstand drawer.

I did not appreciate how you handled that, Dan. Maybe keeping you there another year will teach you a lesson.

That’s not fear. It’s not trauma. It’s not even grief.

It’s HR.

Diane sets boundaries with the same tone you'd use to discipline a coworker who messed up a spreadsheet. She's not processing a crisis, she's issuing a performance review. The unsettling brilliance of this moment is how mundane it feels.

In that one line, we understand everything:

Diane isn’t trapped in a surreal reality. She’s running it.

When people challenge her logic, she files them away.

The Bobblehead: Erasure as Control

The bobblehead moment sneaks up on you. It’s small. Almost comical. No jump scare. No dramatic sting. Just...boop. And yet, it might be the most chilling moment in the entire film.

Why? Because it shows us who Diane really is.

And because it uses one of the most innocent cultural artifacts - a bobblehead - to imply something profoundly sinister.

On the surface, bobbleheads are harmless. They’re collectibles. Tokens of fandom. You get them at baseball games, from comic shops, as desk decorations. Their purpose? Commemoration. Celebration.

But also: reduction.

A bobblehead distills a person - a celebrity, an athlete, a character - down to their most iconic features. Big head. Exaggerated grin. Wobbly neck. A bobblehead is not a person. It’s a symbol of a person. A curated identity - simplified, sterilized, and preserved in plastic.

So when Diane receives a bobblehead of Alan - her coworker, her maybe-romantic-interest, the person who tried to intervene - it’s a verdict.

Alan has been processed. Condensed. Filed away. Transformed from a disruptive force into a novelty item. He’s no longer a threat to Diane’s reality - he’s a souvenir of it.

Alan, in this metaphor, represents reality. The outside world pressing in on Diane’s tightly wound psychological architecture. And like any good administrator of a controlled environment, Diane responds by recontextualizing him.

He’s not dangerous. He’s not even wrong. He’s just…irrelevant now.

The bobblehead is the final symbol of the film’s central thesis: that what we bury doesn’t disappear. It mutates. What we suppress doesn’t vanish. It decorates.

Diane’s bedroom is a museum of control. Dan is her shadow self. Alan is a failed intervention. The drawer she confines Alan to? That’s where she keeps the stories that don’t serve her anymore.

The bobblehead is the punchline, but it’s also the period.

It’s the moment we stop wondering what’s real and start realizing: it doesn’t matter.

Diane has built a system so airtight, so absurdly functional, that reality itself has no power here, only Diane.

Scoring the Absurd

If My Roommate Dan is a surreal dance between reality and absurdity, then the soundtrack is the DJ - equal parts hypnotic and hilarious.

From the very first note, the music - written and performed by Marty, I’m Afraid - doesn’t just support the scenes, it animates them. The opening track, an offbeat anthem about an axolotl, might sound like a meme in motion…but it sets the perfect tone: strange, specific, and kind of beautiful in its own way.

It sets the tone perfectly, especially in the third act, where it plays out beautifully. We matched some of the lyrics to the action, and it all worked. We’re so privileged to work with such a wonderfully talented band.

That word - privileged - isn’t hyperbole. Marty, I’m Afraid’s entire album, Avenue C, feels like it was written in a parallel universe where Dan’s underbed lair has its own radio station. The lyrics echo the film’s themes of hidden depths and unlikely bonds. It’s dreamy. It’s doomy. It’s chaos.

It works because it doesn’t take itself too seriously, just like the film, yet is so profound when you look beneath the surface

When the closing scenes roll and the music surges, it doesn’t offer emotional resolution, it offers vibe. It reinforces that what you just watched wasn’t about plot as much as feeling.

The Making of Dan

Behind every surreal short film is a very real production headache and My Roommate Dan had its fair share of “Wait, what!?” moments.

Take, for example, the very first day of filming. The team had scouted the perfect location with perfect parking. They even had maps with arrows. But on shoot day? A massive party appeared out of nowhere. Every single parking spot was gone. The crew had to drag equipment up a hill, unplanned and unamused.

That was not at all fun. But once we started rolling in the bedroom, it was exactly as I imagined it.

The film's eerie, saturated tone was no accident - it was built shot by shot, with contributions from the whole team. The now-iconic reverse-mirror scene early in the film wasn’t even in the original vision. It came from DP Andrew Dutton, and it instantly added a layer of psychological depth that mirrored (literally) the film’s themes of inversion and reality-bending.

Robert’s approach to directing was just as collaborative.

Everyone had a say on set. It was fun. Probably what would surprise people most about making this short is just how much fun we had.

But not everything made it into the final cut. The original script imagined an entire world under Diane’s bed - one we only briefly glimpse when Alan is sucked beneath. In that unmade version, Diane explores a dreamlike space and re-emerges back into her reality transformed.

It was supposed to be a much longer movie, and still could be made into a series or full-length feature. Maybe someday we’ll produce that.

Until then, My Roommate Dan remains its own self-contained fever dream - one that tiptoes the edge of genre, tone, and sanity, with just enough room left under the bed for your imagination.

Where to Watch

Ready to descend under the bed and meet Dan for yourself?

Watch My Roommate Dan now on YouTube:

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Trust us, this is one rabbit hole you want to fall into.