I Googled it and apparently, there are 7 kinds of stories out there. This doesn’t seem like it’s the right number. Even if there are more than the 7, there are a lot of films about the eighth kind. In this eighth, two lives change after their fateful encounter. Luca Balser’s What Doesn’t Float gets points off for retelling that eighth. It also chooses New York, the center of the universe, as its setting. But there is, for the most part, a complexity to these meetings. A man (Roger Howarth) knocks over a cart and feels the wrath of a bystander (Alexandra Templer). A couple (Keith Poulson and producer Pauline Chalamet) have what may be the worst date ever. An older man (Larry Fessenden) tries to clean his car but a girl (Chanel and Dior Umoh) knocks over his bucket of water.

Clocking at 70 minutes, What Doesn’t Float is the kind of film that live and die at festivals, but thanks to OVID, it gets a second life. It shows the variety in New York life that makes me wish I can live there. Yes, there’s the New York kind of variety where all the action takes place near brownstones and skyscrapers. But it also gives its viewers different kinds of terrain which reminds me that yes, we shouldn’t be surprised that there are beaches or piers in a coastal city. The actors playing these characters look normal even if they’re mostly white. This is reminiscent of indies of the 1990s. Most of the vignettes in What Doesn’t Float are delightfully unpredictable but there are a few where comedy lacks.

One such vignette in What Doesn’t Float centers on a man who masturbates after finding a woman skinny dipping on the beach until he thinks that the ocean swallowed her. The punchline for that feels tacked on. Another vignette is about the bad thing that happens after a group of finance bros’ (including Garrett Forster) innocent night out at a pizza place. I already don’t like finance bros to begin with and sadly, that vignette has a hard time grabbing my interest. My complaint in the previous paragraph still stands in that most of the scenes are about white men. A woman writing these vignettes doesn’t excuse that, and there are components here that are missing to make it a ‘female gaze’ kind of film.

The demographic problem in What Doesn’t Float may just be a me problem. Aside from this, the film deserves credit for its editing. The film in general sells itself as a comedy but as these things go, the dramatic parts of this anthology may be the parts that work better. That, or it has a tendency to linger on characters it favors, which benefit the film as a whole. Its last vignette is about a middle aged sailor (Joel Nagle) whose dreams make him injure himself out of bed. This vignette captures the tried but true idea that dreams have their surrealist elements. The vignette solidified that water is a theme here, duh, as well as the challenge these characters face a loneliness they’re trying to beat.

Watch What Doesn’t Float on OVID.