Connie has a lasagna to deliver next door. By the time she gets there, she has crossed a continent, won a race, and lost a fight with a porch step. The joke of Lasagna Run is how its whole theory of anxiety so elegantly captures the micro-moments of panic and stress that so frequently make up life's little whirlwinds... while highlighting how different things look from a distance compared to the inside of one's head.
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Connie (Danielle Pollari) is puckering in front of the mirror when she remembers the potluck. It's as if the entire film were built around the oldschool acting trick of "remember the oven is on," and it's great. In reality, the task she undertakes after this point is simple: she stumbles downstairs, pulls the lasagna from the oven, wraps it in foil, and runs next door to the potluck. But James Livitski shoots the whole errand as if it were the Boston Marathon embedded inside an oldschool Nintendo platformer. The result feels like the trailer for a full-budget film while being a complete story in just three and a half minutes.
The film opens on Connie’s mouth as she lip-syncs an old love song. The title words “A LOVE LETTER TO ANXIETY” surface across her face. The song seems to be playing as if from within her own mind, where she basks in a moment of feeling like “such a pretty face”; but the mirror isn't sure she fits the bill. She adjusts her hair, puckers her lips, tries a smile and therein finds something green wedged between her teeth. There’s an uncomfortable familiarity in that mirror, but where another film might wield the situation as horror, Lasagna Run presents it with the self-reflexive comedy that is inherent to real life. And then, just as we're unsure where the next moment will land, the camera zooms forward into a peephole vision within Connie's eye: a fisheye face, a room full of people, the potluck compressed into a keyhole.
DID YOU FORGET? asks the man in her vision.
And just like that she rememmbers the lasagna in the oven, the timer goes off, and the brilliant panic begins.
Livitski and Matt Popowich, the film’s cinematographer and editor, understand that anxiety is a matter of scale. The domestic opening is boxed into 4:3; when Connie leaves, the frame opens into widescreen and the world becomes a side-scrolling level. The camera stays fixed. The horizon stays flat. Connie is a tiny red figure moving across train yards, slag heaps, snowfields, and pine woods.
The effects are mostly in the editing. The train sequence is the film’s best piece of misdirection: the train stays off-screen but we hear it coming, and Pollari’s run across a broad series of tracks takes on the frantic energy of a cartoon character hearing the anvil drop. The forest is stranger still: a handful of other women hurrying through the trees with bags, as if a whole crowd of passerby were somehow pulled into her own private race.
Then we cut to a stadium, the film’s biggest swing and one of its funniest. Connie bursts onto a running track, high-fives a crowd, shakes hands with a man in a suit, and raises the lasagna overhead while confetti falls. The sports announcers can’t agree on what she’s carrying. “A casserole,” one says. “That looks more like a lasagna to me,” says the other. They can agree she’s fast. It’s the Forrest Gump run by way of Super Mario Bros., and she runs the whole race in oven mitts.
Spoilers ahead for the final act.
And then the film brings her home. The street is the same street. The houses are the same houses. The frame contracts back to 4:3 and subtly slides to the side. The potluck was next door the whole time—the distance between two front doors. And, after all her stress, all her imaginings... Connie trips going up the steps. The lasagna goes down with her: trip, smack, crash. It is the most painfully relatable thing in the film, and it made me literally laugh out loud from sheer schadenfreude. The film holds the wide shot and lets the friend’s voice carry the scene:
“Oh dude. What, what you do?!”
“My lasagna... I made lasagna...”
“Ah damn. Well, it looked good!”
“I’ll clean that up.”
“Nah, it’s cool. It’s gross, but nah, that’s fine.”
And that's what I ended up loving the most about this little comedic gem. Connie has spent three and a half minutes in a private epic of shame and grandiosity but then the world comes along and responds with a shrug and a paper towel. Sure, the lasagna is ruined, but the friendship is fine. It's a reminder that maybe, just maybe, the things playing out in your head don't need to be taken as seriously as your nervous system demands.
My only reservation is that the film is so efficient I wanted more of it. The film leaves you wanting the next scene, which is exactly what a great short should do. I wanted to watch it again and send it to a friend. Lasagna Run passes the test at a sprint.
Lasagna Run (2026) is available to stream for free on YouTube. Runtime: 3 minutes 28 seconds. Written and directed by James Livitski. Starring Danielle Pollari. Cinematography and editing by Matt Popowich. Sound design and score by Ethan Myers.
I’m Odin Halvorson, a librarian, life coach, and fiction author. If you like my work and want to support what we do here at Unenlightened Generalists, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to our newsletter for as little as $2.50 a month!
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