The first installment in our For Your Consideration series is “Pink Grapefruit,” a ten-minute short by the writer-director Michael Mohan. The film—which premièred at Sundance, in January, and went on to win a jury award at South by Southwest—takes place in a serene vacation home in the Palm Springs desert. A young woman (Wendy McColm) arrives there with her friends, a slightly older married couple (Nora Kirkpatrick and Matt Peters), and we quickly learn that they are subjecting her to a rather intense version of a blind date: a single man she’s never met (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) will soon be joining them for the weekend. Like any jaded millennial, the woman greets the impending setup with a sense of dread: “These things never work out!” she says on the car ride out. But, when her suitor arrives, things don’t go quite as expected. (And without spoiling anything, we hope, we should note that this film contains sexual situations.)

Mohan’s previous work has, like “Pink Grapefruit," often centered on young adults negotiating rituals of romance and sex, and their shifting expectations and desires. His 2011 short film, “Ex-Sex,” follows a former couple who decide to reunite and hook up for a day, with no strings attached. “Save the Date,” a 2012 romantic comedy, stars Lizzy Caplan and Alison Brie as sisters with polar-opposite attitudes toward romantic commitment. The characters in these stories are appealingly recognizable, the rhythms of their speech as generationally specific as their hapless mating rituals. “It’s only gonna be weird if you make it weird,” the ex-girlfriend tells the ex-boyfriend in “Ex-Sex,” when proposing their rendezvous.

But the story in “Pink Grapefruit,” of a young couple’s first encounter, turns out to be, as Mohan has put it, a cinematic Trojan horse. Shot in lush colors, with lingering images of the arid California hills, the film also makes use of an eerie desert silence, and the voyeurism of the glass-walled vacation home suggests that something pernicious is afoot between the two couples. What Mohan was really interested in exploring, he said, is how young adults “measure our happiness and success by comparing it to those around us.”

Mohan, who also directs music videos and commercials (like a pair of very fun short films for Kate Spade, starring Anna Kendrick and Lily Tomlin), is currently beginning work on a new film project called “The Ends.” Co-written with Chris Levitus, who also co-wrote “Pink Grapefruit,” the film portrays the life of a young woman by examining her past breakups. Mohan said, “We want to show how our past relationships shape the person we ultimately become.”

For viewers of “Pink Grapefruit,” he has a piece of practical advice: “If you’re out at Starbucks … you should probably wait until you get home to watch it so nobody in your immediate vicinity thinks you’re a creep.”