Lisa Steen | Stepdaddy / 2019

invitation to dinner

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anna Greenfield (screenplay, based on a story by Lauren Blumenfeld and Max Jenkins), Lisa Steen (director) Stepdaddy / 2019 [7 minutes]

Wyatt (Max Jenkins) has invited his friend from long ago, Patricia (Lauren Blumenfeld) over for dinner. Apparently they have gone to school together, when she had somewhat of a crush on Wyatt, even though she knew he was gay. She still describes their acquaintance as somehow “being together,” and from what he mentions, rather contentiously over the increasingly difficult dinner conversation, it is apparent that she has at one point attempted to suck him off, knowing full well at the same event that he was attracted to a boy at the event. 

    When she suggests that he has never been able to take criticism, after describing his terrible performance at a karaoke bar, he bitchily responds: “I forgot that you drink wine like you give head—with tiny, sharp little fangs that hurt my foreskin.”

    Meanwhile, he has moved forward with his life as a macrame artist—hardly a stunning career— while Patricia can only respond that she has moved away from her intended career.

    Hurt by the way conversation has brought up former contentions between them, she is ready to drive home drunk, pausing in the doorway just long enough to tell Wyatt that the only reason she has accepted his dinner invitation is that she has frozen her eggs, and knows no one other than him whom she might invite to be a sperm donor.

    But at that very moment, her own father (Peter Gallagher) shows up at the door, Patricia being quite confused, but then imagining that Wyatt has called him to give her a ride home. Almost immediately, however, she finds it strange that he would have her father’s telephone number. And it quickly becomes apparent that the person who Wyatt has told her he is seeing is her own father, who now has the difficulty of explaining that he and Wyatt, having in love, are about to marry, meaning that Wyatt will be her….the final word is never spoken, since it is, after all, the title of this very devilish and humorous short film.

     Unless she wants her stepfather to also be the real father of her own children…well that’s for her to figure out when and if she makes it back to her own house sober enough to evaluate the new situation.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).