And They Watched
2015 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Vivian Lin
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark
A woman employed as the custodian of an electric chair tends to the machinery of execution as if it were an ordinary job, in a still and quietly nightmarish portrait.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Lin strips the death penalty of its theatrical dread and just... shows up to work—which somehow makes it weirder and more unsettling than any scream-filled chamber piece ever could. It's the kind of oblique moral horror that doesn't announce itself, which is exactly why everyone else sleeps on it.
The film's restraint—its refusal to editorializes or heighten—places it in conversation with the slow cinema lineage while maintaining a distinctly contemporary formal intelligence; the stillness becomes the statement, and the craft is in what's deliberately withheld.
The decision to treat the execution machinery with the same mundane attention as a mop and bucket—that one behavioral choice recontextualizes the entire ethical weight of the piece and proves you don't need budget, just clarity of vision.