Whiskaboom

Jack is the kind of inventor who asks whether Einstein would approve of his work, and then does it anyway. Moving into the home of the tolerant Mr. and Mrs. Burroughs, he retreats into his workshop to perfect a machine that goes "whiskaboom" with increasing urgency. The experiment, naturally, goes catastrophically sideways. Jack doesn't explode or transform into something else. He becomes flat. Two-dimensional. A man compressed into a paper-thin version of himself, still fretting about whether his work would have pleased the great minds of physics. What follows is a gently absurd meditation on obsession, pride, and what it means to need help when you've literally squashed your own ego. The Burroughs, bewildered but devoted, tend to their flattening housemate with more grace than he deserves. When Jack finally summons his father, the reunion is both ridiculous and genuinely moving, a son confronting the gap between his grandiose ambitions and his rather diminished state.