Annie Clark is aware of the perils of dilettantism. Her cracked art rock is anything but—even at its most uncaged, the music she makes as St. Vincent is in-control, adroit, world-class. When we speak over the phone on a recent afternoon, though, she mostly doesn’t talk about her music. She talks about directing and co-writing a short film, The Birthday Party, which is part of a new female-driven horror anthology feature called XX.

“I know what you mean,” Clark says after I express some trepidation about artists working outside of their best-known medium. “It’s like when your friend shows you a picture and says, ‘I’m drawing now!’ and it’s something that might look really good if a 10-year-old drew it—but they’re 30.” But in Clark’s case, there’s no need to worry. The Birthday Party is not only competent, but funny, strange, and visually rich. It stays true to the unique mix of black humor and heart that marks some of her best songs.

The short stars the effortlessly relatable Melanie Lynskey (Heavenly Creatures, “Togetherness”) as a disheveled housewife named Mary who simply wants to give her anxious 8-year-old daughter a fun birthday to remember. Which happens. But not exactly as Mary planned. Because as she’s preparing for her guests to arrive, she finds her husband slumped over in his office chair, dead. Even so, the show must go on. What follows involves a rapping panda bear, a kid in a toilet costume, and a fair amount of Weekend at Bernie’s-style, lugging-a-corpse-around shenanigans. Based on actual events that happened to one of Clark’s friends, she says The Birthday Party is about “the idea of waking up with a body in the house and having to make—in a second—a big decision to protect your children.”

XX debuted at Sundance last night (January 22) and will open in theaters and on-demand February 17.

Pitchfork: This film depicts an 8-year-old’s birthday party that goes very wrong. Do you remember how you celebrated your own eighth birthday?

St. Vincent: Oh my god, yes. When I turned 8, we had the party at a putt-putt golf course that also had an arcade. So me, my mom, my sister, my step-dad, and my best friend Doug were on the highway to the party and we were behind a truck that had a bright pink sofa on it. All of a sudden, the sofa fell out of the back of the truck. My mom put on the brakes, swerved to miss it, jackknifed, and hit the guardrail on the left side of the street—we spun around across three lanes of Texas traffic to the shoulder of the road.