AI-POCALYPSE
2020 · 14m
Directed by Lin Sun
Genres: experimental, sci-fi, thriller
A programmer's artificial intelligence research opens onto a fourth dimension, and the technology begins to escape her control.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A programmer accidentally tears open a fourth dimension and loses grip on her own creation—it's sci-fi premises stacked on sci-fi premises, gloriously indifferent to whether you can follow the physics, and it commits harder to surreal dread than any competent thriller would dare.
Sun's formal control over the escalation is precise, anchoring the experimental visual language in genuine narrative progression; the film understands its debt to New Wave sci-fi while refusing to merely reference it.
The decision to let the AI's presence bleed through degraded video artifacts and glitched audio rather than render it literally—that one choice does all the heavy lifting, turning a modest budget constraint into the film's most unsettling asset.