MAFIA

Ah, the great British family gathering: where civility is worn like a crumbling mask, passive aggression is served in generous helpings, and the post-dinner game is less light entertainment and more emotional Thunderdome. In "Mafia," James Cleave and Tom Ward-Thomas serve us a delightful slice of familial chaos, wrapped in a deceptively innocent parlour game and sprinkled with just the right amount of generational resentment. 

For those unfamiliar, "Mafia" is a social deduction card game — essentially a group exercise in lying, accusing, and trying to remain civil while your relatives metaphorically (and sometimes literally) try to kill you. Naturally, it makes the perfect arena for this short film, which is less about the rules of the game and more about the beautifully dysfunctional people playing it. 

At the centre of the madness is a family that feels like it’s been stitched together by the same seamstress who did Frankenstein’s monster — and is just as prone to turning on itself. As the game unfolds, so too do the secrets, grievances, and eyebrow-raising admissions. Think Agatha Christie, but if Poirot had to solve a murder between his sister's passive-aggressive comments about his mustache and a half-baked confession from Uncle Keith about a holiday in Ibiza that no one was meant to know about. 

Rosalind Adler, as the steely-eyed matriarch Cynthia, delivers her lines with the sort of withering Britishness that could curdle cream. You can tell she's the kind of woman who thinks therapy is something Americans do instead of having a proper cup of tea. Opposite her, the younger cast — including Tom Ward-Thomas and Cheska Hill-Wood — bring the perfect mix of awkward vulnerability and smug self-righteousness that only millennials armed with wine and Wikipedia-level psychology can muster. 

There’s a sense, watching this, that the film is a Trojan horse. It sneaks in under the banner of comedy, disarming you with chuckles and crisps, only to suddenly gut-punch you with an emotional reveal or a look that says I’ve been holding that grudge since you stole my hamster in 2002. The camera work is nimble but never showy, leaning into close-ups that make you feel like you’re stuck at that dinner table with no hope of escape — short of crawling under it and pretending to be the family dog. 

Is it all entirely plausible? Of course not. But then again, neither is that yearly lie you tell yourself that this time Christmas dinner won’t end in tears and someone Googling how to legally disown a sibling—which I may or may not have looked into myself... once or twice. 

What’s most impressive is how much narrative meat is packed into 15 minutes. It’s lean, tight, and very British — like a Marks & Spencer’s meal deal that somehow manages to explore intergenerational trauma, sexual politics, and sibling rivalry before the tea and scones even hit the table. 

In short, "Mafia" is a deliciously sharp short that understands one universal truth: families are weird, games are dangerous, and putting the two together is only ever going to end one way — with someone storming out, someone crying, and someone pretending it was just a bit of fun.