5 Films About Technology

Five sketches about social media is exactly the kind of premise that makes everyone groan—until you realize Huang's actually weaponizing the format itself, turning the sketch anthology into a hall of mirrors that reflects back how broken our attention spans have become. It's the rare satire that doesn't settle for dunking on the obvious target.

Huang demonstrates formal control across disparate comedic registers, each sketch calibrated to expose a different layer of social performance while maintaining tonal coherence—there's real architecture here beneath the surface satire, a lineage that traces back to absurdist television and observational short-form work.

The decision to compress five separate tech anxieties into a 5-minute sprint forces each sketch to land on a single devastating image or interaction rather than belaboring the joke—it's a constraint that transforms what could've been lazy smartphone-comedy into something precise and surgical.

In 5 Films About Technology writer/director Peter Huang conducts a kind of anthropological study—exposing the dumber side of modern technology in a painfully hilarious, and very entertaining way. Every single person can recognize themselves in at least one of the vignettes, and some of the situations might even hit close to home for more than a few of us.

The gags are mostly based on unexpected effect—the shorter they run, the funnier they are, and the rhythm keeps us engaged in the story by not allowing our attention level to come down. Huang's aforementioned choice of aspect ratio, and quick-hitting comedic editing serve to trap the audience in the characters' lack of peripheral view, and see how centered on themselves they are.

5 Films About Technology had a good run on the festival circuit, premiering on the filmmaker's home turf during Tiff 2016, before making American audiences laugh at Sundance 2017.