A still from Endless Cookie by Seth and Peter Scriver, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Endless Cookie Review: What a Great Ball of Yarns

Sundance 2025

/
10 mins read

Endless Cookie
(Canada, 97 min.)
Dir. Seth Scriver, Peter Scriver
Programme: World Cinema Documentary Competition (World Premiere)

 

If a chicken burger offers life advice in the freezer aisle of the grocery store, do you take it? That strange event happens to Cookie, a young woman perusing the frozen goods when her dad, Pete, keeps yammering on about farts and Pizza Pizza. Cookie tells the chicken burger, or rather the talking box of chicken burgers, that she hopes for better days for Indigenous kids. Her eye travels along the frozen foods, peculiar oddities bearing names referencing Canada’s colonial history, and shrugs off the encounter with a laugh. Her hungry belly keeps her mind on the present.

This sort of strange occurrence runs throughout the offbeat animated oddity Endless Cookie. The film by Cookie’s uncle Seth Scriver aims to collect the stories of his half-brother, Peter. But the rambling yarns show why these tall tales from the freezer aisle are moments to hold onto: seemingly inconsequential stories from daily life offer instructive fables for us all.

The droll adventure through Pete Scriver’s wayward tales begins when Seth receives some good news from the NFG. Canada’s public funder, who appears as a cantankerous right-angle ruler, tells Seth that he’s been awarded an Explore and Create Grant. Seth’s plan is to make a documentary about Pete’s stories. He says his half-brother is the best damn storyteller he knows. He heads up north to Shamattawa, Manitoba to record seven of Pete’s legendary tales.

As half-brothers, the Scrivers’ project checks all the boxes that might appeal to Canada’s film funder. The brothers share a father, who is white, while Pete’s mom is Indigenous. Seth, the younger brother, has a white mom and lives in Toronto. Their story bridges a great span of Canadian culture and boasts a uniquely collaborative approach to filmmaking.

There’s just one problem though: the NFG probably didn’t anticipate the fallible nature of storytelling. Nor did they probably expect the healthy dose of WTF that Scriver sprinkles into Cookie like chocolate chips. If Pete has seven stories to tell, he maybe finishes one of them by the end of Endless Cookie. That’s where the film really strikes comedic gold. Seth, arguably the creative lead on the project, grasps that the power isn’t necessarily in the stories that Pete shares, but rather his way of telling them and the ways in which his conversational yarns intersect with the community.

Up north, Seth records Pete’s accounts in audio. Pete starts to regale him with a tale about a time he went hunting on the traplines and got his hand caught in a trap. But a toilet flush interrupts that take and Seth asks Pete to pause. When someone strolls into the room after using the john, Pete strikes up a new conversation. Dogs muddle the audio with their collective snoring—Pete has 12-16 dogs depending on the day, so the dog-snoring is rather voluminous.

One of Pete’s kids might be playing video games with the volume too loud, or any neighbouring jackass might just walk into Pete’s house, start a conversation, and change the direction of the story. Unlike Toronto, people in Shamattawa say “Howdy, neighbour” and make conversation. Other times, Seth might simply turn his microphone to Cookie, who makes some farting noises for potential sound effects. All the while, Pete keeps yammering on with stories flowing in and out of the audio.

Pete’s stories frequently digress into random tangents or, more often, other people’s stories, too. An interaction may prompt a narrative turn to, say, talk about the time a snowl owl landed on someone’s arm. Or how Pete’s grandmother would make candy by taking a caribou stomach and mixing its bile-laden contents with a cup of blood and some sugar. “My first candy was kind of gross,” Pete laughs.

Eventually, these detours circle back to Pete’s account of the day he got his hand caught in the trap. But what’s really funny is that the moral of the story sort of becomes undone by the film’s end, or rather the existence of the film itself. Pete tells his brother how he endured bitter cold and excruciating pain while finagling his hand out of the trap. Even when neighbours passed by him, Pete would act like all was well. He shares how he saved himself from embarrassment whilst freeing his hand. But now everybody in Shamattawa knows the tale.

The brothers’ great sense of humour, meanwhile, finds repeated punctuation marks in Seth’s eccentric animation. The film offers more of the eclectic comic book style visual palette with which Scriver introduced himself in the 2013 animated drama Asphalt Watches, but he goes to the nethermost regions of the lunatic fringe here. Endless Cookie runs with the offbeat nature of Pete’s seemingly nonsensical stories. People have balloons for noses. Their heads might resemble found objects, like toilet seats and garlic bulbs, while every inch of their surroundings is detailed with a historical time stamp, like graffiti that screams “Free Leonard Pelletier” or subtly sarcastic Easter eggs for discerning eyes and ears.

Pete’s dog Peanut looks exactly like a butt-wiggling Mr. Peanut, complete with monocle and tail. He even poops all over the place, much to Pete and Cookie’s delight. “Peanut butter,” Cookie laughs, observing a fresh turd, to which her father replies, “Crunchy or smooth?” That chuckle leads to another digression about dog poop collectors in Victorian England. Because why not?

Pete makes clear through the stories he shares—and the ones he doesn’t—that narratives about Indigenous communities too often favour pain, poverty, and misery. Seth fills in these bits for him and lets him counter them. Endless Cookie finds a humorous refrain with images of an empty car in which the seats listen to the radio. News reports about Indigenous communities flood the airwaves with faceless statistics. Stories of inept RCMP buffoons, meanwhile, show the shoot-first, ask questions later mentality that lands one neighbour in jail after a squirrel pitches a donut hole at a cop car. Meanwhile, an elder carving a caribou inspires the officers to drop and roll like John McClane. Pete’s take on the events sends the coppers flat on their asses.

The sheer randomness of Endless Cookie, however, amounts to a wonderful design. This film illustrates the pleasure to be found in nostalgia and the importance of passing down stories by generations. Pete’s fish stories have great markers of time, place, and history in their own roundabout ways. As Seth burns through a pile of public money to his brother’s stories, the adventure provides a cathartic laugh. The film shares the importance of humour in keeping a community spirit alive and healthy. If it means focusing on seemingly mundane fables that kind of/sort of have a moral, but at least provide some levity, so be it. Endless Cookie may be the strangest, most seemingly nonsensical documentary in some time. But there’s one truth to a whackadoodle odyssey like this one: you will definitely have a story to tell afterwards.

Endless Cookie premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Read more about the film in our interview with Seth and Pete Scriver.

Pat Mullen is the publisher of POV Magazine. He holds a Master’s in Film Studies from Carleton University where his research focused on adaptation and Canadian cinema. Pat has also contributed to outlets including The Canadian Encyclopedia, Paste, That Shelf, Sharp, Xtra, and Complex. He is the vice president of the Toronto Film Critics Association and an international voter for the Golden Globe Awards.

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