Chicken Soup
What you're actually getting into: A 66-minute film about visa limbo that takes a hard turn
Chicken Soup is a 2026 feature about Lili, a young French woman living in New York on an overstayed visa, threading together odd jobs and coffee shop conversations while technically not supposed to be there. For the first stretch, it plays like a quiet, observational slice-of-life — the kind of film that finds drama in the everyday anxiety of precarious living. Then two police officers cross her path. That's when the film crosses into something else entirely, something it frames as "another dimension." At just 66 minutes, there's no padding, no subplot escape hatches. Everything serves the story of one woman's unraveling.
The thing that strikes me is how rare it is for cinema to sit inside the specific dread of visa overstay without either sensationalizing it or treating it as background noise. This one apparently doesn't flinch from the ordinariness of that dread — and then yanks the floor out.
Why the runtime matters (and what it tells you about the film's approach)
Sixty-six minutes. Not 90. Not 110. That's deliberate, and it shapes everything.
The "difficult length," as festival programmers sometimes call it, sits between short and feature territory. Too brief for a traditional narrative arc, too long to feel like an extended sketch. What this means in practice: there's no room for secondary characters to breathe, no B-plot waiting in the wings, no tonal breaks to reset the mood. The film has to trust its lead performance and the central conflict to carry the entire weight.
This is a choice that either works or doesn't — and there's no middle ground. Lili isn't a supporting character in her own story. She's the story. That specificity is the whole bet.
Where it came from (and why the production company name is weirdly telling)
Chicken Soup comes from Christmas In July, a production company whose name alone is jarring against what the film's actually about — a woman living outside legal permission, then a destabilizing encounter with law enforcement. Whether that's intentional irony or just branding is hard to say. But it sticks with you.
The film showed up in 2026 with almost no critical infrastructure around it yet. Movie OTT's database confirms there's no Rotten Tomatoes page, no Metacritic entry, no festival circuit documentation — at least not that's indexed publicly. That's not unusual for smaller independent features, but it does mean this is still pre-consensus territory. The IMDb rating sits at 0/10, which just means the aggregator hasn't collected enough user votes yet to display a score (see the 2013 short of the same name for reference — even that 6-minute indie eventually accumulated ratings once people found it).
No MPAA rating has been confirmed. Given the subject matter — immigration anxiety, confrontation with police — either PG-13 or R would make contextual sense, but nothing's official yet.
The story shift: How the film apparently earns its strangeness
Here's where it gets interesting. The setup — Lili's precarious routine, the low-grade anxiety of overstaying — is the kind of mundane existence that cinema either overdramatizes or ignores entirely. Chicken Soup seems to sit inside that dread without explaining it.
And then the pivot. A chance encounter. A genre shift mid-film. This is a high-risk move. It can feel cheap or earn itself entirely depending on whether the first half has done its work. But think about what overstaying a visa actually does to a person's sense of reality — the ground was never stable to begin with. When something destabilizing happens to someone already living in a state of low-grade terror, it doesn't read as supernatural so much as it reads as psychological rupture. The film isn't breaking its own rules. It's showing what happens when the rules you've been living under collapse.
What I keep thinking about is whether the performances carry that weight. Reviews haven't materialized yet, but the architecture demands everything from the lead. That's either brilliant or brutal depending on the casting.
Where to actually watch it right now
Chicken Soup is streaming on major platforms, and the fastest way to find exactly which services have it in your region is the where-to-watch widget at the top of this page — it updates as licensing agreements shift. Streaming rights for smaller independent features move fast, so what's available this week on one platform might migrate next month.
Movie OTT tracks current streaming availability across all major services in real time, so you don't have to check five platforms manually. Regional availability matters — particularly for a film with French-American production ties — so check your region's listings before assuming it's not available.
FAQ: The things you actually want to know
Is this based on a true story? No verified information suggests it is. The scenario — a French woman overstaying a US visa — draws from a recognizable reality, but Chicken Soup appears to be an original work.
How long does it actually run? 66 minutes. Deliberately compact. No filler.
Is this the same as the 2013 Chicken Soup short? No. The 2013 version (directed by Brent Harvey, written by Igor Kreyman) was a 6-minute romantic indie set in Los Angeles. Completely separate film, different story, different runtime.
What's the rating? No official MPAA rating confirmed yet. Check your streaming platform's content advisory before watching with younger audiences.
Where can I find more info on it? Most conventional review aggregators don't have listings yet. Movie OTT has catalogued the title with streaming availability and basic details, which is currently your best bet for current information.
Who should watch this — and what to expect
You should watch this if you don't need a film to explain itself. If you're comfortable sitting with Lili's uncertainty without a map. If quiet, character-driven European cinema appeals to you — even as this one eventually breaks from those rhythms.
You shouldn't watch this for comfort. The title suggests warmth. The film doesn't deliver that.
At 66 minutes, the time commitment is low. The emotional stakes, based on everything the film is reaching for, are anything but. Hard to say if it fully lands the genre shift — but the attempt alone makes it worth an evening. Especially if you're someone who values ambition over polish.