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By scotthgilliland on June 25, 2026 |
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Louisa Connolly-Burnham’s The Intimacy Coordinator is an intense, gut-wrenching short film. A clever film that grips you with a horrible sense of dread. From beginning to end, this is a sensational short film from a filmmaker whose work becomes essential viewing.
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Kate (Louisa Connolly-Burnham) is an intimacy coordinator working on a new project. On point at all times, she excels in her job. But Kate is hiding an important secret from her colleagues. She is also a sex addict, and she is struggling.
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Connolly-Burnham continues to knock her projects out of the park as a quadruple threat (Actor, Director, Producer, and Writer) in the short-film world with her latest film, The Intimacy Coordinator. The sense of dread never leaves The Intimacy Coordinator. From the moment Kate sits down in her chair beside the director, you just get the feeling that something is off with her in some form.
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Connolly-Burnham expertly paces her film and even offers minor hints of evolving themes throughout. At the start of the film, Connolly-Burnham fakes us out by giving us the impression that it’s almost an unrequited lust (albeit one-sided) between two coworkers. This then promptly changes as we learn more about Kate and her addiction, and also the horrible state of her mental health. This film doesn’t just focus on her addiction; it shows us the mental instability of someone who wants to be “normal”, but her addiction and the methods currently being used in treating it are not sufficient for her.
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The fact that The Intimacy Coordinator could easily focus on the addiction side and, somehow, in its short runtime, mesh so many themes perfectly. One exceptional success is that the film is really a tragedy of a young woman who isn’t seen enough by those closest to her, and without their help, she becomes lost. She wants to be seen and heard; she explicitly wants help, which makes the rest of the film all the more gut-wrenching. She has forged a career in which she controls others’ intimacy to suppress her acting on her impulses. It’s a foolish endeavour, but for now, the only one she knows to try and keep herself in check, even if it is currently failing rather miserably when we get to the support group meeting. But what remains is that Kate DOES want that help.
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So, in the scene where she calls her mother and makes the difficult call to admit to her that she is struggling with her addiction. We hope that she will be taken seriously and helped, but she is rebuffed in a pretty emotionally brutal manner and with that is really the beginning of the end for Kate’s mental health. In each subsequent scene, Kate is emotionally hit again and again as she makes mistake after mistake. It is truly painful to watch her spiral, and as the final confrontation begins, you feel there is only one outcome.
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Louisa Connolly-Burnham is fantastic here, in what is certainly her best performance so far. She is going through all the waves of emotion, but the common thread throughout is pain in some form. She needs to be loved and heard, but she has no way of making that happen at the moment because of her addiction, so inevitably, as we see throughout the film, she is alone and lost within herself and her own thoughts, and Connolly-Burnham plays that so well. It is the type of performance you hope will get her into prominent feature roles, as the talent (as a writer and director) is clearly there.
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Yet wisely, we see that she isn’t innocent in everything that she does and how she is coping with her addiction, as poor Nigel, a fellow sex addiction support group member, is dragged into her impulses while trying to keep up with his own sexual sobriety. The resulting implosion of this reveals a completely different side of the woman, who becomes broken. By showing us both the empathetic side of her character and the almost monstrous, destructive side, we have a fully fleshed character who, while we may not love, we are truly compelled by.
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In the end, The Intimacy Coordinator is an unforgettable short film that will have audiences talking long afterwards. The Intimacy Coordinator is one of the best of the year.
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