Leaving his dream behind, a man joins a successful company that hides nothing but dark secrets.
Fun blend of humour, dread and sci-fi. When was the last time you heard “corporate” or “corporation” used for a good reason? You said, “Never?” Kombucha is a sharp, darkly comic slice of corporate sci-fi that disguises its existential dread behind humour, exaggeration, and an almost absurdly familiar workplace reality. It weaponises recognisable corporate rituals – performance check meetings, artificial enthusiasm, impossible deadlines, and obscenely inflated salaries and bonuses designed to anaesthetise modern servitude – and pushes them to the doppleg… I’m not saying anything else about it…
At the centre of the film’s satire is its deceptively simple conceit: a kombucha that enhances productivity, focus, and compliance, slowly becoming indispensable to those who consume it. What begins as a wellness perk morphs into a chemical leash, binding employees to their work environment until they are alienated from the outside world, disconnected from loved ones, and, most disturbingly, estranged from their former selves.
Writer Geoff Bakken and co-writer/director Jake Myers strike an effective tonal balance, blending humour, tension, and creeping unease. The comedy lands because it is grounded in truth: anyone who has sat through a performance review framed as “growth,” or been rewarded with perks instead of time, will recognise the trap immediately. The sci-fi elements function less as spectacle and more as metaphor, amplifying a reality that many already live in.
The performances lean into hyperbole, but that exaggeration is precisely the point; a caricature sharpened to reveal something uncomfortably real beneath. Not without faults, Kombucha ultimately presents a bleak catch-22: abandon your creative and personal ambitions to become a well-fed corporate asset, or cling to idealism and survive on scraps in a system that punishes nonconformity. The film doesn’t claim there is no middle ground – but it strongly suggests that, as time passes and societal pressure tightens, choosing becomes inevitable.
Funny, unsettling, and depressingly relatable, Kombucha recognises you and your pain.
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