Film Review: Aaron and His Dad Try to Find Closure & Lucy Celebrates Andie’s Birthday at Universal CityWalk Hollywood’

Brad Roelandt’s audacious single-take short turns Universal CityWalk into a miniature universe where grief, friendship and spectacular social embarrassment collide in real time.

There is something inherently funny about a movie whose title practically provides its own plot synopsis. Yet Brad Roelandt’s Aaron and His Dad Try to Find Closure & Lucy Celebrates Andie’s Birthday at Universal CityWalk Hollywood is considerably more sophisticated than its deliberately unwieldy name suggests. Over roughly nine minutes, Roelandt stages two unrelated emotional crises simultaneously, watches them gradually drift toward one another and somehow finds a strange tenderness amid the chaos.

The 2025 short follows two stories unfolding at Universal CityWalk Hollywood. Lucy has arrived with a birthday surprise for her friend Andie, only to discover that the celebration may not be proceeding quite as she imagined. Elsewhere, Aaron, played by Colin Burgess, reluctantly accompanies his father on a considerably darker errand: finding somewhere to scatter the ashes of Aaron’s mother. Eventually, these two miniature disasters intersect.

It is an inspired collision of the devastating and the ridiculous.

Roelandt shoots the entire affair as a roaming, single-take bird’s-eye composition, making the audience less a traditional observer than some omniscient presence hovering above these characters’ private catastrophes. The short is the third entry in Roelandt’s series of single-take, overhead films, following Joey Earns Rewards Using the McDonald’s Mobile App.

The technique could easily become the movie’s entire reason for existing. Instead, Roelandt uses the formal challenge as a storytelling device.

From this elevated perspective, CityWalk becomes almost architectural. People enter and disappear from the frame. Relationships are established by proximity rather than conventional coverage. Characters who occupy completely separate emotional universes suddenly cross paths because, physically, they happen to be standing within a few feet of one another.

It is filmmaking that asks the viewer to actively participate. The eye wanders. One instinctively chooses whom to follow before realizing that something equally important — or considerably funnier — may be happening elsewhere.

The effect resembles watching an elaborate theatrical production from the balcony, except Roelandt’s camera refuses to remain politely seated.

The choreography required to make the short function is formidable. Characters must arrive at precise moments, dialogue must overlap without collapsing into noise, visual jokes must occur where the audience can discover them, and the camera must continuously redirect attention without obvious cutting. NoBudge, where the film later streamed, appropriately described the series as an exercise in technical ingenuity and choreography.

But Aaron and His Dad… works because underneath that ingenuity is something recognizably human.

Lucy’s storyline is built around one of adulthood’s smallest but most excruciating humiliations: realizing that the social situation you believed you understood may not exist in quite the way you imagined. She arrives with all the enthusiasm of someone determined to make another person feel celebrated. Then she begins to recognize that her place within the group is less secure than she thought. The situation escalates until her movement across the courtyard ends with balloons escaping and a birthday cake meeting an unfortunate fate.

It is broad physical comedy, certainly, but Roelandt doesn’t treat Lucy merely as the punch line. There is vulnerability inside the absurdity.

On the opposite end of the emotional spectrum — at least initially — are Aaron and his father.

Aaron’s dad has come to Universal Studios determined to scatter his late wife’s ashes, eventually arriving at the bizarrely specific conclusion that Minion Mayhem is the appropriate destination.

That sentence alone demonstrates Roelandt’s comic wavelength.

Yet the joke never entirely cancels out the grief beneath it.

There is something almost painfully believable about a bereaved person assigning enormous emotional significance to a location that would appear absurd to everyone else. Grief rarely possesses good taste. It attaches itself to restaurants, amusement parks, songs, parking lots and objects whose importance only makes sense to the people who shared them.

Roelandt understands that.

The film’s comedy therefore comes not from mocking loss but from acknowledging how strange human beings become while trying to survive it.

Burgess is particularly effective as Aaron because he plays much of the situation from the exhausted position of someone who has already accepted that he is not going to win this argument. The distance of the camera paradoxically strengthens the performance. Without close-ups dictating precisely what the viewer should feel, posture, hesitation and movement become crucial. The ensemble — which includes Amelia Marino, Julian Shine, Lena Redford, Jordyn Wright, Ash Hegedus, Rachel Yoder, Charlie Han and Aaron Bleyaert — functions almost like a piece of comic choreography, with individual performances contributing to the larger machinery of the frame.

The location matters just as much.

Universal CityWalk is a place engineered for spectacle — bright signage, artificial environments, restaurants, retail, attractions and constant motion. Roelandt places intensely personal experiences inside this aggressively commercial environment and allows the contrast to do much of the comedic work.

Someone is trying to process his wife’s death.

Someone else is discovering an uncomfortable truth about friendship.

And somewhere nearby, Minions exist.

Life continues with almost offensive indifference.

That may be the film’s funniest idea, but it is also its most perceptive.

Roelandt, who serves as writer, director, producer and editor, refuses the conventional filmmaking instinct to isolate important moments. There is no sudden close-up informing us that grief has become meaningful. No cutaway announces that Lucy’s embarrassment deserves our sympathy. Everything happens together.

Consequently, tragedy and comedy are not opposites in Aaron and His Dad…. They occupy the same frame.

That becomes the short’s quietly lovely philosophy. Every person moving through a public space is living at the center of a story invisible to everyone around them. A stranger carrying balloons may be experiencing heartbreak. A man talking about an amusement-park ride may be mourning his wife. Someone wandering past with absolutely no connection to either situation may accidentally become part of both.

The title might sound like someone forgot to stop typing.

The film itself knows exactly where it is going.

Roelandt turns a brightly lit tourist complex into a miniature portrait of human absurdity, suggesting that grief, loneliness, friendship and comedy are constantly unfolding beside one another whether we notice them or not. Aaron and His Dad Try to Find Closure & Lucy Celebrates Andie’s Birthday at Universal CityWalk Hollywood is a technical magic trick, certainly — but the greater achievement is that somewhere beneath all that choreography, it has a surprisingly generous heart.