Dragon Fruit: Astute Sci-fi That Shows the Tiredness of It All

J.Brown’s Dragon Fruit runs to nearly half an hour, longer than your average short, but it makes the minutes count. A film set in a dystopia (it becomes less and less meaningful to point out how well they increasingly resemble reality, but there we are) about a single mother with a necessary and ridiculously distant dream of a vacation, Dragon Fruit hinges the entire weight of its protagonist’s hopes on the yield of a spindly little plant in a pot of sand and faeces. 

The incongruency of the little spot of green in a landscape of beige and brown is only half as dramatic as Yvonne Chapman’s unnamed mother hoping for a vacation. But the dream, however dusty, exists and becomes the raison d’etre for the family of two with nowhere to go, little to possess and almost nothing to look at (except the new plant and the fun, young neighbour that Mother hides it from). It feels a lot like 2015’s Room, especially for Azriel Dalman’s blonde-haired, intuitively efficient Son. 

Enemies abound. From the cartoonishly villain Boss (Chris Gauthier) at the local marketplace to fellow desperate citizens to their easily sparked mob violence, Mother, equipped with a makeshift spear, looks at everyone only in terms of survival. The rapid pace set by the editing and reinforced by the retro synth score hammers in a single idea: be quick. To hunt, to sell, to make away with the day’s earnings and her life. There is no grandeur to this world, measured in petty wins and trivial deaths, and most obviously, narrativised with snappy, fun cuts. Even Mother’s dream is petty in all its McGuffinness. When a police officer (Omari Newton) allows her small mercies, Mother grabs onto that feeble/flammable straw and prays for the best. 

Of an all-around excellent cast, Chapman obviously stands out, blending hardened survivor with vulnerable young woman, a performance entirely physical in the near-total absence of dialogues. The neighbour (Nicole Muñoz) and son also operate within this limit, building a relationship based on a seemingly rare show of silliness instead. 

Dragon Fruit maintains a very thin veneer of seriousness that deliberately does not hold up to scrutiny. The underlying, easily discovered, farce is its point. Mother is insignificant, as is everyone else breaking their back (and stabbing others’) to survive the brutal new regime of scarcity. What can they do but live petty lives and die?

Watch Dragon Fruit Sci-Fi Short Film Trailer