A Dance of Lust & Calculus
2017 · 20m · USA
Directed by Christian Flashman
Genres: drama, romance, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Sankhar Bennington is a young programmer who helps grieving clients find life after death by building interactive computer models of their deceased loved ones. When he is hired by the quirky, eternally nervous Sacha Gadfly to recreate her father, the two begin to develop real feelings for each other and must choose between clinging to the past and embracing a future together.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects sci-fi grief-tech to go *dark*, but Flashman sidesteps the obvious trap—he's genuinely interested in whether tenderness and resurrection can coexist, which is weird enough to actually matter.
A formally composed meditation on presence and absence that knows its lineage (Kaufman, Gondry's digital-romance territory) while earning its own measured tone through deliberate pacing and restrained performance.
The film lives or dies on the moment Sacha chooses to step away from the recreated father—and Flashman lets that choice breathe in silence, a single editorial beat that makes the whole apparatus of love and loss suddenly *real*.