Assassin’s Creed – Lineage
2009 · 36m · Canadá
Directed by Yves Simoneau
Genres: action, adventure, historical
Three linked shorts narrate events that precede the second Assassin's Creed game. Hidden blades, Renaissance intrigue and secret orders set the stage for the game saga.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Video game tie-in shorts sound like marketing poison, but Simoneau treats Renaissance assassination plots with genuine noir severity—the subversion is that it takes itself seriously enough to actually work, which is the opposite of what you'd expect from a prequel cash-in.
Simoneau's triptych structure and commitment to period formalism—the composed frames, the deliberate pacing across three acts—grounds what could've been disposable IP into something that sits comfortably in the lineage of prestige game adaptations and classical adventure cinema.
The film's entire engine is the choice to shoot it like a historical drama rather than a game cutscene: that tonal discipline, that refusal of the obvious visual language, is what transforms a licensing obligation into something that actually breathes.