Avoid Asking
2025 · 3m
Directed by Alexander David Hoff
Genres: horror, sci-fi, thriller
A young man is recruited to question a creature of unimaginable origin using only a flickering light to communicate, and he is not prepared for the answers.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most shorts about interrogation play it straight—procedural tension, moral ambiguity, the usual. Hoff flips it: you're trying to *understand* something that resists understanding, and the flickering light becomes both weapon and confession booth. The premise does something genuinely warped with the interrogation format.
There's a disciplined formalism at work here—the light as both narrative device and visual syntax, echoing cinema's earliest experiments with visibility and meaning. The constraint of three minutes sharpens what could've been baggy sci-fi into something closer to a parable, with clear debts to the structural horror tradition.
The choice to let a flickering light carry the entire communication burden is what makes this work—it strips away dialogue and forces the film to trust rhythm and visual grammar to do the talking. That one constraint generates all the strangeness and dread; everything else serves that decision.
Festivals
- Spooktacular Film Fest for Horror & Sci-Fi 2025, Official Selection