Binge Watching
2019 · 7m · United Kingdom
Directed by Nosa Igbinedion
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
A privileged London woman killing time on an advanced virtual entertainment system chooses a programme that lets her experience life through another person's eyes. She finds herself inside the perspective of a young Black man whose wait for a ride home turns into a violent encounter with two police officers.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The film does something genuinely perverse with the VR-as-empathy-machine premise — instead of the expected catharsis, it traps a privileged viewer inside helplessness, making her complicit witness rather than enlightened savior, and the violence doesn't resolve her discomfort, it deepens it. Most filmmakers would've softened this into inspiration porn; Igbinedion leaves the wound open.
Igbinedion's formal control is precise — the subjective camera work recalls first-person cinema traditions while the editing rhythm mirrors the mounting dread of police encounters documented in recent work like *Whose Streets?*, situating this within a lineage of politically urgent formal experimentation.
The crucial move is the sound design during the encounter itself: we hear what the protagonist hears (muffled, distorted, terrifying) rather than objective audio, and that single technical choice collapses the distance between viewer safety and lived threat in a way no dialogue could.
Reviews
The 7th Matrix called it a powerful, necessary viewing experience, noting it was filmed before George Floyd's murder, released online the day after, and based on the filmmaker's own encounter with police.