A Robot is a Robot
2018 · 6m · Denmark
Directed by Emil Friis Ernst, Nilas Røpke Driessen
Tones: darkly comic, tender, whimsical
A disabled robot war veteran, reduced to begging on the street, is taken in by an elderly woman who employs him in her hair salon for cats. The gentle new life is tested when his old killer programming resurfaces around a difficult feline customer.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is genuinely deranged—a killer robot grooming cats in a salon—but the film plays it so tender and sincere that it neuters its own weirdness; it's a subversive idea that's been domesticated into something almost conventional.
The tonal architecture here is impressive, balancing whimsy and existential dread across genre markers, though the restraint occasionally reads more like hesitation than conviction—a film aware of its own formal ambitions but not fully committed to them.
The entire emotional core hinges on one choice: playing the robot's violence not as spectacle but as muscle memory surfacing involuntarily, which transforms what could've been slapstick into something genuinely tragic and singular.
Reviews
Mind Matters enjoyed the animated-stills storytelling, the priceless encounter between the robot groomer and a difficult cat, and the grim reminder that machines lack common sense.