Review: Lasagna Run (2026)

In James Livitski’s short film Lasagna Run, a homemade lasagna becomes the unlikely object of an epic quest. 

Connie (Danielle Pollari), an anxious woman charged with delivering the dish to a neighbourhood potluck, has only a short distance to travel. Yet the journey expands into a succession of improbable landscapes, as though the mind, confronted with an ordinary obligation, has mistaken it for a test of survival. Livitski’s directorial debut finds its comic premise in this disproportion between the modest demands of daily life and the extravagant difficulties anxiety can manufacture.

The film opens intimately, with a young girl pouting at her reflection in a mirror and adjusting her braces. Against the soundtrack’s wry invocation of a “pretty face,” a title announces the film as “A Love Letter to Anxiety.” The domestic scene soon gives way to an immediate practical emergency: the lasagna is ready, and Connie must get it out of the oven and deliver it. In her haste, she leaves a kitchen turner on the floor, unable to retrieve it with her oven mitts still on. Such minor mishaps establish the film’s governing sensibility. What might ordinarily pass unnoticed becomes an obstacle in a world where every small inconvenience threatens to derail the entire undertaking.

As Connie sets off, the film’s visual grammar begins to register the scale of her distress. The initially compact 4:3 frame widens, giving her darting eyes and restless movements a heightened theatricality. Clutching the casserole, she races through an empty railway yard, past a dump, across a snow-covered expanse and into a forest. The abrupt transitions have the logic of a video game, in which the protagonist must negotiate successive environments before reaching the next stage. In the woods, multiple versions of Connie appear, each seemingly caught in the same anxious business of working out what to do next. Her predicament becomes a landscape of competing impulses, the mind’s frantic rehearsal of possibilities rendered as physical space.

Livitski draws on his childhood affection for Nintendo and two-dimensional games, as well as his own longstanding experience of anxiety. The influence is evident not merely in the film’s inventive structure but also in its playful manipulation of cinematic space. Connie’s red hoodie and black trousers stand out against carefully arranged, vividly differentiated environments. The compositions by Matt Popowich, who also serves as the editor, possess a graphic precision, while the sudden shifts in scale and setting lend the action the unreality of a game whose rules are constantly being rewritten. An insistent drumbeat, punctuated by cymbals, propels Connie forward, turning an otherwise unremarkable errand into a race against an enemy that remains invisible.

Eventually, Connie reaches a stadium track, crosses the finish line and receives an award. The sequence is absurdly triumphant, as though she has completed an athletic feat rather than travelled a short neighbourhood distance. Then the film returns her to the place from which she started, the frame contracting once more into its original proportions. Her destination is still nearby. The elaborate odyssey has occurred less in the geography of the neighbourhood than in the experience of moving through it.

Connie’s effort, however, carries a measure of recognition. Anxiety is often difficult to explain precisely because its apparent causes can seem so trivial to an outside observer. Livitski’s film makes that discrepancy visible without treating his protagonist's distress as a personal failing. Its affection for her is apparent in the sheer ingenuity with which it enlarges her predicament. 

At three minutes, Lasagna Run is a brisk, formally inventive comedy whose greatest pleasure lies in recognising that the distance between two houses can sometimes feel like an entire world.