While waiting for his water to boil to make tea, a young man enters a state of distorted reality. This surreal experimental short by director Nick Shultz gets a lot of mileage out of a trippy soundscape and enigmatic framework. After an incident involving a door frame pull-up bar, a mundane evening morphs into a hazy otherworld. Next thing we know, an unidentified man in a suit stands in his kitchen reciting bad jokes. Who is he, and why does his voice sound so strange? If this is some sort of passed out hallucination, where does it end? An exercise in tone and loss of consciousness, “While the Kettle Boils” wrings odd humor and general WTF weirdness out of vivid sound design and dream logic.

Directed by Nick Shultz.