The film at a glance.
A Selection of Frames
The Metronome
Home, Work, Bed
The Dinner Party
The Library
The Swan
In the Dark
The Sheet Music
The Ritual
Dusk Ride“Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming our hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” — Sigmund Freud
When her home, work, and relationship collapse into one space, a one-star review forces a Brooklyn piano teacher to face her own unhappiness.
Lyla, late twenties, lives, works, and conducts her relationship inside the same small Brooklyn apartment. Her partner Paul recently moved in — his dresser displaces the bed, his blender interrupts her lessons, his charger crowds the outlet. The apartment used to be hers. Now it holds everything.
At a dinner party, she and Paul try a psychedelic with their closest friends. For everyone else, it's clarifying. For Lyla, it strips away her ability to perform okayness without giving her anything to replace it.
In the weeks that follow she cuts down her neighbor's wind chimes in the dark, nearly chokes to death on a grape in a library while no one looks up, and stalks the stranger who left her a one-star review — only to find her crying on the phone, more lost than Lyla is.
Threaded throughout: four confessions to a figure at the edge of the frame. By the last one, what she's confessing to isn't what she thinks — and there's nowhere left to hide.
The MetronomeHome, Work, BedThe Dinner PartyThe LibraryThe SwanIn the DarkThe Sheet MusicThe RitualDusk RideA piano teacher whose apartment is also her workspace, whose workspace is also her bedroom, whose bedroom is now also Paul's. Her students arrive at the door she eats breakfast behind. The metronome on the counter belongs to the same room as everything else.
She doesn't think of herself as unhappy. She thinks of herself as someone doing her best.
She's wrong about one of those things.
Stills of Cailee Spaeny in BEEF (Season 2, 2026), shown as a casting and tone reference. Not affiliated with this production. Source: ShotDeck.
Warm, well-meaning, recently moved in. Does the crossword in pen. Not a villain — a person having a different experience of the same life, with no idea how wide the gap has become.
Married. A unit. Guests at the dinner party that sets everything in motion. Their lightness is real, and Lyla cannot quite reach it.
A teenager memorizing every lesson because he can't read music and won't tell his father. Lyla lets it slide — she recognizes the performance.
Owns the wind chimes — tuned, she says, to 432 hertz, the frequency of universal love. Reassembles what Lyla breaks with a care Lyla lacks for herself.
A name attached to a one-star review. A woman whose private life Lyla discovers — and who, when found, is more lost than Lyla is.
Where work, home, relationship, and students all overlap. A space the camera treats as a character — one that has slowly stopped being hers.
Three films that stayed with us while making this film.
Peele finds beauty and unease in the same frame. His worlds are bright, saturated, and lush, while the dread sits quietly beneath ordinary life. We're drawn to that tension — where something familiar feels just slightly wrong.
Akerman finds meaning in ordinary things. A room, a routine, a coffee cup. We love the idea that behavior and environment can reveal what characters can’t say out loud.
His characters rarely feel settled. They're searching, drifting, and trying to make sense of their lives. We were drawn to that emotional space.
The film is built around four kinds of light: warm practicals, deep-blue night, color that feels slightly wrong, and sunset.
A visual artist and filmmaker. An Artadia grant recipient and Glassell School Artist in Residence, with short films shown at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, and work in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. For two decades the Creative Director of Article&, shooting campaigns and directing video. Writer-director of three shorts: Hidden Steps, Sabrina's Dream, and Self-Storage. Common Unhappiness is his first feature.
A producer whose career spans museum publishing, retail, and independent film. Trained as a studio artist, she began at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, then joined the Guggenheim in New York, producing art books and managing the museum's website. In 2005 she co-founded Article&, which she has run for two decades. Producer and First AD on all three shorts.