Like Father, Like Son? (Sådan Far, Sådan Son?) is streaming in Online Short Showcase 1 at Panic Fest 2026
Like Father, Like Son? (Sådan Far, Sådan Son?) opens with an arresting dream, premonition or memory. As a distorted song plays on the radio of a car parked in the middle of nowhere, Simon (Ludvig Deltin) sits bloody and slumped over the steering wheel. Then he wakes in the same driving seat, no longer bloody, and hides a liquor bottle in the glove compartment before his father (Jimmy Lindström), appearing out of the shadows, can get in. The father also has a bottle, and is jolly and aggressive from a night of drinking in a nearby dive bar, but still notices that Simon is in a daze. “He just sits there sleeping,” the father comments, himself sitting in the back seat because the front passenger door will not open. With one tail light also out of order, on this dark, misty road the car is an accident waiting to happen.
“I’m getting tired of having to pick you up,” Simon complains, in what is a journey that he has clearly taken many times before without ever getting anywhere or making any progress. For both these men are locked into a cycling, combative relationship fuelled by alcohol. Indeed Simon is drunker than he seems, and keeps having visions of his father in different seats, or bleeding from the head – and all that is before Simon finally accepts his father’s offer of a swig from the bottle, and drinks deeply, despite being in command of a barely roadworthy vehicle. Their conversation turns to death, as Simon asks his father if he was present at Grandaddy’s passing. “I helped him along,” is the answer, a line whose resonance Simon misses amid all the bickering.
Josef Embring and Philip Sterner’s short film is a two-handed road movie, and also, as its interrogative title suggests, a mystery. For this recursive journey into the night takes a metaphorical, indeed existential backroad, as the son must reckon with the legacy of toxic masculinity bequeathed by his father (“You turned out just like me”, Jörgen observes), and must come to terms with a crucial situation about which he is still in denial despite multiple hallucinatory hints right from the outset. For in this nightmarish limbo, Simon is so close to grasping the truth and seeing the final destination of this drive through the dark – but he just needs to be helped along. And so as this lost soul, racked with guilt and undone by his own bleak inheritance, must go the way that we all do in the end, Like Father, Like Son? proves equally tragic and profound.
strap: Bound by blood: Josef Embring and Philip Sterner’s short film sees bickering male kin on an alcohol-fuelled journey down the same dark road
© Anton Bitel
