Splashback finds its comedy in the smallest possible stakes set against the biggest event of the twentieth century.
What is Splashback about?
Set during the Moon landing, one of the defining moments in human history, the film follows a worker at a NASA warehouse whose real preoccupation has nothing to do with the mission overhead. While the rest of the world watches astronauts step onto the lunar surface, he is absorbed in a personal side project: designing the first urinal net, a small, mundane invention that has nothing to do with space travel and everything to do with solving an everyday annoyance. The contrast between world-historical spectacle and one man's fixation on a minor plumbing problem is where the film gets its comedy, playing the mismatch of scale for laughs rather than treating the space race as anything more than backdrop. At under half an hour, Splashback keeps its premise tight and its tone light, closer to an extended sketch than a conventional historical comedy.
About the cast
The film's cast includes Alan Hay, Matthew Simpson, Sam Rintoul, David Gilliam, Timothy Nixon, Kent Goldfinch, Tesa Litvan, and Luka Alagić, an ensemble suited to the film's brief, sketch-like runtime. With Splashback running under thirty minutes, the performances stay tightly focused on a single comic idea rather than building out a larger cast of subplots.
Context & significance
Splashback was directed by Luka Hrgović and Dino Julius and produced in Croatia, part of a tradition of short-form comedy that mines historical moments for an odd, human-scale angle rather than restaging the event itself. Setting a workplace-invention comedy against the Moon landing lets the film use one of the most documented events in modern history as a straight-faced backdrop for something deliberately trivial, a contrast that short comedies often use to get a laugh without needing a large budget or elaborate production to sell the joke. Its Croatian production places it within a growing body of Central European short film work finding audiences at festivals and, increasingly, on streaming platforms.
Watching Splashback on Ktime
Splashback streams on K-Time with a free account login, with no separate subscription tier or trial period standing between viewers and the film. The title streams in its original language without a Persian dub or subtitle track at this time, though K-Time's browsing experience and menus are presented fully in Farsi for Persian-speaking audiences.