Two dudes battle it out over the grill in exclusive clip from Dad & Step-Dad

A dad and his grill is something that can actually be so personal. It’s a cliche for a reason, because so many suburban American fathers take a proprietary pride in grilling for their loved ones. That’s what makes the tension in a new clip from Dad & Step-Dad, now streaming on Mubi, so delicious. Played by Anthony Oberbeck and Colin Burgess, the titular dad and step-dad face off over who gets to be the man to man the grill. It’s incredibly awkward as Jim tries to encourage Dave to add charcoal to the grill “for taste.” “Well, the hot dogs come with flavor,” Dave replies. “I don’t know if you know they make them with flavor in them, so….”

Dad & Step-Dad is a fully improvised comedy “about family, communication, insecurity, and the fragility of the male ego, the film follows Jim and Dave, a dad and a step-dad, as they struggle with bonding during a weekend upstate with Branson, the son they share,” reads a synopsis for the film. The movie was born from a series of web shorts about two guys butting heads about how to parent Branson (played in PEN15 style by the adult Brian Fiddyment). The characters “basically are the same guys, but there’s a fundamental disconnect between them that [makes it so] they’re not realizing that,” Tynan DeLong, the director of the web series who makes his film debut with the feature-length Dad & Step-Dad, said in an interview with our sister site Paste.

DeLong’s previous short films can be found on NoBudge, the streaming platform for emerging indie filmmakers making work on microbudgets. The service’s first foray into distribution, Dad & Step Dad is “Inspired by cinéma vérité documentaries, ASMR, and Japanese environmental music, the formally and tonally unique character-driven slow-burn was shot in four days during the summer of 2021 with a production budget of $18,000.” The film, which stars Oberbeck, Burgess, Fiddyment, and Clare O’Kane, can be viewed on Mubi now, just in time for Father’s Day.