Film

Shirkers

A documentary about a stolen film and the decades-long hunt to find it. In 1992, teenage Sandi Tan shot Singapore's first indie road movie with her mentor Georges, who disappeared with all the footage. Twenty-six years later, it resurfaces, and Tan—now a writer in LA—traces his ghost while reconstructing what was lost. It's part mystery, part self-examination, lyrical and funny.

TMDb rating3.6

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love detective-style hunts through lost artifacts, where the search itself reshapes the person searching and the making of a movie becomes the mystery.

Skip it if you want a tidy, outward-facing true-crime style case with steady answers; this is more personal and loose, circling memory and self-examination rather than delivering clean answers.

What it asks of you: Expect a patient, detour-filled runtime of about ninety-seven minutes, where the pace follows Tan's own digging and the mood shifts between wry and wistful.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Casting JonBenet2017

Another documentary about absence and obsession, where a vanished girl becomes a canvas for competing narratives. It's fractured, haunting, and asks what we do when we can't know the truth.

But The subject matter is genuinely dark—the murder of a child—and the film's experimental structure can feel slippery and deliberately evasive.

Casting JonBenet poster

The Imposter2012

A man claims to be a boy who went missing years before. The documentary unfolds the lie in real time, and like Shirkers, it's about how stories we tell reshape who we become.

But It's a con-man narrative that rewards patience; the payoff doesn't hit if you're looking for conventional resolution.

The Imposter poster

First Reformed2018

Paul Schrader's film about a pastor unraveling mirrors Shirkers' slow excavation of truth. Both are meditative, visually precise, and grapple with faith—in God, in people, in art itself.

But It's bleak and slow-moving, with an ending that many viewers find unbearably heavy rather than cathartic.

First Reformed poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Shirkers

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Sans Soleil1983

Both films reject the idea that documentary must be a straightforward account. Instead they use the form to think, to drift, to ask whether memory and art can capture what being alive feels like.

Chris Marker's experimental essay film moves through time and memory like a dream, connecting Japan, Guinea-Bissau, and the mechanics of forgetting. Shirkers shares its conviction that documentary can be lyrical, fragmented, true.

But It's avant-garde, without a clear narrative or dramatic arc. If you need a story with a beginning, middle, and end, this is not it.

Sans Soleil poster
More like this (8)

The 400 Blows1959

Truffaut's portrait of a young artist finding himself through cinema. Like Shirkers, it's tender toward adolescence and treats filmmaking as a way of knowing the world.

But It's in French, in black and white, and from 1959—if those things sound like work rather than invitation, it won't move you.

The 400 Blows poster

The Act of Killing2012

A haunting documentary where the filmmaker directs perpetrators of genocide to recreate their crimes as they remember them. It's a radical inquiry into how narrative and performance reshape memory.

But The violence depicted is atrocious, even second-hand. The film's method—asking killers to perform—is intentionally discomfiting and won't sit easily with viewers.

The Act of Killing poster

Lost River2015

Ryan Gosling's directorial debut is a dreamlike portrait of a vanishing place. Like Shirkers, it finds poetry in loss and treats a dead world with weird, tender specificity.

But It's aggressively weird and visually cryptic. If you want straightforward narrative, this will feel like watching someone else's fever dream.

Lost River poster

A Ghost Story2017

A deceptively simple film about grief, time, and what it means to be left behind. It shares Shirkers' interest in how absence can be more present than presence.

But The central image—a man in a sheet—can read as silly. The pacing is glacial, and the philosophical bent won't appeal to everyone.

A Ghost Story poster

Synecdoche, New York2008

Charlie Kaufman's opus about a theater director recreating his life as art. Both films collapse the distance between making a work and living—between the film and the filmmaker.

But It's baroque, deliberately confusing, and three hours long. The narrative ambition can feel like pretension if you're not in the mood to surrender.

Synecdoche, New York poster

Boyhood2014

Linklater filmed the same cast over twelve years, watching a boy become a man. It shares Shirkers' meditation on time, memory, and the artist's relationship to what's passed.

But To its detractors, it's formless and minor—people sitting around talking. The real-time approach can feel like gimmick rather than revelation.

Boyhood poster

Chungking Express1994

Both are love letters to cinema as a way of rescuing the ephemeral. Both treat a lost or distant place/person with such specificity and tenderness that the film itself becomes an act of preservation.

Wong Kar-wai's film about missed connections in Hong Kong is a love letter to a city and to cinema itself. It's formally playful, achingly romantic, and suffused with the ache of things that almost happened.

But It's MTV-paced and emotionally oblique; very few plot points land in conventional ways. The style is so dense it can feel alienating.

Chungking Express poster

The Tale2018

Both are formal experiments about an artist excavating their own past, and both understand that sometimes the recovered truth is more ambiguous and strange than the mystery was.

Jennifer Fox's documentary about uncovering childhood abuse mirrors Shirkers as an artist grappling with an incomplete past and the gap between what happened and what she remembered. It's brutal and necessary.

But The subject is childhood sexual abuse, rendered in unflinching detail. The trauma is not softened or narratively resolved; the film asks you to sit with discomfort.

The Tale poster

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