As You Were
2014 · 20m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Trevin Matcek
Tones: contemplative, tender
In the near future, a wounded soldier returns home with advanced prostheses replacing an arm and a leg lost in combat and must reconnect with his family.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Surface-level sci-fi prosthetics as metaphor for emotional distance—the premise wants to be provocative but settles for what every other homecoming story already whispered. Where's the weird angle that justifies the speculative window dressing?
A formally restrained meditation on embodiment and familial rupture that sits comfortably within the tradition of intimate domestic drama; the sci-fi apparatus feels almost decorative against the film's true investment in tactile, emotional reintegration.
The decision to let the prostheses remain functionally mundane—refusing to fetishize or weaponize them—is what unlocks the whole film; it's the physical grammar of how bodies move through space that becomes the real storytelling, and Matcek trusts that completely.