Who is The Jellyfish Man? Actor Adam Hagenbuch and Director Ben Davis Made a Surreal Short Film

The suburbs have this weird place in society as a safe haven from the hustle and noise of urban life, but if you look closer, they are one of the strangest places you'll ever encounter.

They are a symbol of freedom even though all the houses and manicured lawns are built and required to look pretty much the same. They hinder a chance to create a community while the inhabitants lock themselves up, away from others. They separate us by keeping us next to each other.

"We were constantly thinking about the suburbs and what a weird place it is to grow up in," says filmmaker Ben Davis about the inspiration for his new short film. "Everything looks the same and everyone convinces themselves it's the safest place to be, but no one knows their neighbors. Oftentimes when you're afraid of something, it's the monster in our heads that does more damage."

A combination of imagination and pure luck helped Davis, co-writer and actor Gregory Bordelon and actor Adam Hagenbuch — who played Jimmy Gibbler on the Netflix series Fuller House — to put together an interesting, silly sci-fi short tale of suburbia called The Jellyfish Man. The short has been on the film festival circuit for the past year, including the Seattle International Film Festival's Sci-Fi & Fantasy Short Film Fest and the Austin Film Festival, before being picked up by the YouTube short film channel Omeleto.

"It was originally an idea Gregory had about a next-door neighbor who is an alien," Hagenbuch says. "We're sharing our experience of contempt for suburbia but we wanted to turn it into something a little bit more ambiguous and show the trials and tribulations of neighbor-dom."
The Jellyfish Man starts with Hagenbuch and actress Theresa Rowley as new suburban parents named Spencer and Peyton dealing with a noisy neighbor named Kinkade, played by Bordelon, who constantly plays classical music so loudly they can hear it through the stucco walls. Bordelon is an unassuming type who isn't playing the music to be rude or a nuisance. He seems to think he's sharing something beautiful with his neighbors by playing his music as loudly as his speakers can handle. Spencer, however, reacts with pure anger.

"Yes, Kinkade is an annoying neighbor and does things that might rub someone the wrong way, but Spencer's reaction is very much out of fear that he can't understand Kinkade," Davis says. "We wanted to play on all those themes."

As the events unfold, the story goes in some very unpredictable directions that are best left for viewers to discover on their own. Hagenbuch says he gets a kick out of seeing the reactions to the decisions they made with The Jellyfish Man.

"The response has been a lot of people being confused or surprised by the ending and it definitely seems to be a film that finds its niche with others that are out there or more oddball comedies, which I really like," Hagenbuch says. "It's fun seeing the comments of people saying, 'What just happened?'"

Davis and Bordelon started hashing out the concept for The Jellyfish Man in early 2020 while working on other film projects, and by the following year they had a script. Davis, Bordelon and Hagenbuch came back to Texas for the holidays in 2021 and decided the timing was perfect to shoot the scenes they needed to make the short film.

They found a couple of houses in Plano where they could shoot, and filmed everything they needed in two days.

"It was actually a bit serendipitous or haphazard that we all happened to be in Dallas at the same time for Thanksgiving," Hagenbuch says. "It's not unlike now where you're a bit disillusioned by the lack of productions going on in the industry at the time. We say, 'Hey, we always work great when we're together. Let's see if we can shoot it while we're here.'"

The story also morphed to its scenery as a suburban satire, Davis says.

"There's an old saying that you write a movie three times: the first time when you write the screenplay, on set when you're making the movie and in post-production when you're putting it together," Davis says. "It changed a lot as we went."

The film started screening at festivals before finding a home on the Omeleto network. Hagenbuch and Davis say they are encouraged by the response the film has been getting and are exploring the possibilitiy of expanding their short into a feature-length production.

"Adam is known for being in Fuller House, where he plays a neighbor to the Tanner family," Davis says. "So it's funny to see him in this movie playing a different kind of neighbor.

"Wow, I didn't know Jimmy Dibbler could be so mean," Davis adds with a laugh.

Hagenbuch says he believes The Jellyfish Man has struck a nerve with viewers because even in an age where communication is more accessible than ever, we still seem to be separated by something.

"It genuinely is quite bucolic, warm and hospitable the way these coastal cities aren't," Hagenbuch says. "At the same time, we're not aware of what our neighbors or the people in our immediate space are doing. We may see them mowing their lawn or that they got a new Ford Suburban but the moment they start to get involved, it's met with hostility. It's sort of the communal agreement and the lack of intimacy. There's something to that."