Whoa – don’t be fooled by that title. Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl (2026) may start out kitsch, with all the aesthetic trappings of vintage Americana – but it swiftly takes us somewhere far darker, and it’s all the more intriguing for it.
We start in a kind of Happy Days diner, where a couple kills time before even placing their orders by making out. The beau (Alec Barnett) is a needless dick who only leaves off sticking his tongue down his girlfriend’s throat in a particularly gruelling manner to insult the waitress, Shirley May (Zoey Luna). She barely has the time to respond to his transphobic comments, when she’s happily distracted by a new customer, Dorothy (Abby Langh) and they begin to flirt over the perfect peppermint milkshake. After Shirley-May’s shift, they head off for a date at the local drive-in: everything seems good.
It’s not a straightforward date, though; any time this film seems to be presenting us with something easeful and straightforward, it changes tack. There’s a lot going on in the background in this particular incarnation of mid-20th Century America: we’ve already heard talk of nuclear tests on the diner radio, Dorothy starts talking about aliens – here, as genuinely during these decades, the cheesecake visuals only mask a lot of the cultural anxieties bubbling away beneath the surface. If the date begins to go a little awry when Dorothy reveals she does, in fact, have a boyfriend, then things get considerably more terrifying when a gang of local greasers arrive, determined to split these two up and to unleash their fury on such an unconventional pairing.
So this could have been a meet cute and nothing much else, but Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl has far bigger ideas about how to balance its different elements, giving rise to something quite unique. If it resembles anything visually, then it’s the Fallout game franchise with its own not-quite-real-but-recognisable take on a nuclear-era America, but PPDG manages something quite uncanny and distinctive. It’s all weirdly on point, with a strong visual style aided by careful control of the colour grading, audio and dialogue. Then, having established a world of milkshakes, ribbon accessories and candy stripes, the film steadily wheels in the direction of …almost something grindhouse, with (almost) nudity, violence – and blood. All of this, in less than eighteen minutes.
To put it simply, the promise of deadly nuclear tests feels like the obvious connection between the film’s different modes, and so it turns out to be. It takes a keen eye to hold all of this together, but it works: PPDG a wonderfully strange short film which weaves just a fragment of something post-apocalyptic, but makes it feel meaningful and heartfelt, too.