Believe Me
2025 · 8m · United States
Directed by Shanden Simmons
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A remote conspiracy theorist tries to make contact with something beyond — and gets more evidence than he hoped for.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A conspiracy theorist actually *being right* could've been a tired validation fantasy, but Simmons flips it—the contact arrives, and suddenly certainty becomes its own nightmare. This is sci-fi that uses genre to interrogate obsession rather than reward it, which is exactly the kind of subversive move everyone else would soften.
Simmons channels the contemplative isolation of early sci-fi chamber pieces while maintaining a tight thriller architecture; the 8-minute structure recalls the formal discipline of shorts that understand how silence and restraint operate as narrative tools.
The entire film hinges on a single choice—treating the 'evidence' as genuinely, unsettlingly real rather than ambiguous—and that commitment to literalness in an 8-minute window is what makes the ending land with weight instead of cheap shock.