Two estranged friends, a hard-headed AI researcher and a recovering manchild, reconnect over video chat to repair their relationship, but when they open their favourite retro online shooter, they unleash a digital nightmare that haunts them through their screens and seeks revenge for their history online.
Grimmfest says: Subtly spooky and slyly satiric, Rebecca Wahl’s and Alec Seymour’s microbudget Pandemic-set desktop movie brings two estranged old friends face to face with their own half-forgotten rivalries and a vengeful ghost in the machine, determined to hold them accountable for the misogynous misdemeanours of their past selves. Starting as a droll character comedy, only to become ever more tense and uncomfortable as it progresses, this is a smart, deftly played, and genuinely creepy technological ghost story, that sharply skewers dudebro gamer bullying and its consequences, but also offers a wider meditation on the passage of the years and how people change as a result, and how prejudices are often complex and intersectional, born of time and place and culture.
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THERA WILL SEE YOU NOW (Denmark, 13 min 30 sec)
Director: Kim Sønderholm , Writer: Kim Sønderholm, Cast: Mie Gren, Sara Amlund, Kim Sønderholm
COVID-19 forces global lockdown. Isolation becomes a mandate. Suicide rates reach unprecedented levels. Loneliness becomes endemic. In desperation, governments implement a controversial pilot: AI-led emotional support networks.
Grimmfest says: As the news is filled with grandiose claims for the potential of AI, Kim Sønderholm’s droll and disturbing desktop movie offers a chilling reminder of the dangers dangers of turning over any kind of healthcare to a mechanised operating system, which values “efficiency” over any kind of empathy or humanity…
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