Oat Cult has made a black-and-white folk-horror film about overnight oats, and it is far better than that sentence has any right to be. “Tiramisu” is a 1:50 exercise in committing to the bit, and the question is whether the commitment sells porridge or just sells the people who made it.
The Setup: Friuli, 1539
The film opens in Friuli, Italy, in 1539, shot in stark monochrome that borrows its mood from the folk-horror canon rather than from the breakfast aisle. Villagers walk into the woods and give up things they love, offering them to a hole in the ground. There is no jingle, no smiling family at a kitchen island, no pack shot gliding in from the left. For most of its running time, “Tiramisu” behaves like a short film that happens to have been paid for by a food brand.
That restraint is the whole point. The category is drowning in sunlit spoons and wellness vocabulary, and Oat Cult has chosen dread instead. It is a deliberate refusal of the usual grammar, and it makes the eventual payoff land harder.
The Payoff: Oats to the Face
The hole answers. Overnight, it spews coffee-and-chocolate overnight oats straight into the faces of a devoted crowd gathered around it, a child among them. It is gross, absurd and genuinely funny, and it is the moment the film reveals that it was a joke with a straight face all along. The tiramisu flavour is never explained through a feature list; it is simply blasted at the congregation.
Then comes the line: “Overnight oats, without the sacrifice.” It is a tidy reversal. The villagers gave up what they loved; the product promises you give up nothing. The logic is sound, and the line does real work tying a strange film back to a simple benefit. Whether a viewer remembers the flavour as well as the image of oats hitting a child in the face is another matter, and that is the risk with any spot this committed to its spectacle.
Craft Over Budget Talk
MindsEye London and director Mike Upson play it completely straight, and that is what makes it work. DoP Spike Morris gives the black-and-white frames a texture that feels period rather than filtered, and the edit by Flaura Atkinson at Stitch lets the tension build slowly instead of rushing to the gag. Harbor’s sound design, led by Tom Keats, does a lot of the heavy lifting in a film this quiet. Casting by CDG finds faces that look like they belong in 1539, which matters more than it sounds: one modern smirk and the whole thing would collapse.
The YouTube description claims the brand spent all its money on the film. It follows a GBP 220,000 investment from Anotherway Ventures, so the joke has a pointed context: a young brand takes fresh funding and pours it into a single strange piece of work rather than a spread of safe media. It is a charming bit of self-awareness. It is also a gamble that only pays off if the film travels, because a 1:50 folk-horror piece does not fit neatly into a standard media plan.
Brand Consistency, or a One-Note Cult?
This is not Oat Cult’s first trip into cult territory. We have reviewed an earlier cult-themed Oat Cult ad, and “Tiramisu” confirms that the name is being treated as a creative platform rather than a pun on the label. That consistency is valuable for a challenger brand. Agency Thingy & Thingy, under CCOs Thais Delcanton and Darren Simpson, clearly understands that a distinctive tone is cheaper to own than a big media budget.
The concern is longevity. Cult imagery can become a crutch, and each new execution has to find a fresh angle on the same joke. Here the period setting and the sacrifice-versus-no-sacrifice line give it enough of a twist. The next one will need to work harder.
Credits
- Brand: Oat Cult
- Agency: Thingy & Thingy (CCOs Thais Delcanton, Darren Simpson)
- Production: MindsEye London
- Director: Mike Upson
- DoP: Spike Morris
- Edit: Stitch (Flaura Atkinson)
- Post: 1920
- Sound: Harbor (Tom Keats)
- Casting: CDG
Credits via LBB.
Verdict
“Tiramisu” is a brave, well-crafted and properly funny piece of challenger-brand advertising that earns its strangeness through total commitment. It loses a little on product memorability, since the image of oats in the face may outlive the flavour name, and the cult platform will need fresh ideas to stay sharp. But in a category of interchangeable breakfast ads, this is the one people will actually talk about.
Score: 8/10
