Sarah Silverman, Michael Sheen prove You Can Never Really Know Someone in a new short

In You Can Never Really Know Someone, an amusing but disturbing new short film from the comedy collective Jash, Sarah Silverman plays Gretchen, a highly delusional woman who goes through life heedlessly looking for love in profoundly wrong places. Absurdly fickle and seemingly incapable of telling the truth, Gretchen’s idea of a fun afternoon might be adopting a dog and then immediately trying to have that same dog put to sleep. Other items on her itinerary might include shoplifting some dresses while pretending to be pregnant or just barging into a tax office under the pretext that she’s there to audition for American Idol. Over the course of 12 awkward minutes, directors Aaron and Adam Nee (working from a script by Adam) never definitively establish whether Gretchen is simply a chronic liar and narcissist or whether she truly believes in the never-ending stream of bullshit escaping from her mouth. Either way, she seems to be getting by miraculously well in life.

Along the way, Silverman’s travels take her to an all-male Bible study group, where she manages to charm poor, trusting Michael Sheen (Masters Of Sex, and Silverman’s real life boyfriend), who accepts everything she tells him at face value. Silverman’s character may not be able to distinguish the truth from fantasy, but she has an incredible talent for telling people what they want to hear. Sheen, utterly guileless, is her perfect audience. The two seem to be getting along swimmingly until the evening takes a turn. To say more would be to spoil the joke.