RIDE OR DIE | Omeleto

Two friends attend a party.


Zoey and Gaby are longtime best friends who have been through it all. One night, as they attend a friend's engagement party, Zoey makes a disturbing discovery involving Gaby.

Despite her unease, she helps Gaby try to contain the situation without being discovered by others at the social occasion. But it all might just test the limits of their friendship and their own boundaries with one another.

Directed and written by Liliana Tandon, this short dark comedy explores loyalty, female friendship and the lines between boundaries and codependency, as two friends find themselves navigating a sticky dilemma during a party. Both mordantly funny and emotionally relatable, it paints a picture of the exceptional closeness and loyalty of female friendship, while asking how far we should go for them.

Shot with a moody sheen that feels both heightened yet slightly sinister, the storytelling is a tonal high-wire act, taking the thematic concerns of THELMA AND LOUISE and updating them for a time when filmmakers like Emerald Fennell are pushing boundaries of women's representation onscreen with bleak, sometimes surreal dark comedies. We first met Gaby at what we think is a point of despair; Zoey worries that Gaby has gotten back together with her partner Sean, but the reality is much different. Zoey and Gaby's pesky problem is an undoubtedly bloody one, but it's also juxtaposed against the forced high spirits of a friend's engagement party, framing the action against the expectations and mores of marriage, relationships, love, romance and traditional feminine rites of passage. In Gaby's case, that entire enterprise has collapsed, and she must attend to the wreckage.

It makes for high and heightened stakes, but Gaby isn't alone, as Zoey loyally tries to help, even as she's trying to wrap her head around what Gaby has done. As Zoey and Gaby, respectively, actors Maddy Sykes and Maria Fernandez Diez have a witty, flinty but real rapport, believably portraying best friends whose bond has persisted over time, many inside jokes and terribly damaging relationships. Now Gaby has unwittingly been freed from what emerges as the worst relationship of all -- but it also pushes Zoey into drastic action that is outlandish, brutal, bleakly hilarious and very believable to any best friend that would take a bullet for their bestie.

Compact, vivid and attuned to both its characters' inner lives and the outer pressures they face, RIDE OR DIE is a particularly dark and funny riff on the old female-friendship equivalent of "holding back your best friend's hair while she throws up at a party," where one friend holds space for the other as she hits her lowest point. It vividly and economically portrays two complicated, complex women whose friendship is just as complicated. But it also gets at a fundamental truth of many women's lives: friendships are often the space where they go to feel fully seen, heard, understood and accepted, flaws and all. Most flaws don't rack up a body count, of course, but the loyalty and love at the heart of female friendship means that your best friend will probably still love you anyway.


RIDE OR DIE. Courtesy of Liliana Tandon at https://lilianatandon.com.