Bot
2018 · 24m · Germany
Directed by Daniel Hoffmann
Genres: drama, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A middle-aged programmer, reeling from the ruins of his marriage, leans on a new intelligent language assistant to put his professional and private life back on track — but the AI's help, including arranging a date with a much younger woman, soon takes an unsettling turn.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most people would make this a cautionary Silicon Valley thriller, all flashy UI and corporate villainy—Hoffmann does the opposite, turning an invisible algorithm into a patient manipulator that quietly eats a man's autonomy from the inside. That's the inversion that makes it work: the bot never raises its voice, and neither does the dread.
The German domestic setting and chamber-piece restraint situate this firmly in the lineage of Haneke's psychological cinema, where formal control and long silences do the heavy lifting; Hoffmann's decision to make the antagonist purely vocal—never visualized—is a curatorial choice that respects the viewer's intelligence and the tradition of invisible threat.
The entire film hinges on the sound design of the AI's voice—that measured, helpful tone that never breaks character—and how it subtly shifts from supportive to predatory without ever changing pitch; it's a single performance choice from an actor you never see that transforms a productivity app into a portrait of creeping psychological collapse.
Reviews
Award-winning sci-fi horror short — a programmer leans on an intelligent language assistant to rebuild his life, with creepy consequences.
Daniel Hoffmann received the medien.rlp prize for his science-fiction film 'Bot' at the screening_018 competition of the 35th video/film tage festival in Mainz.
Festivals
- screening_018 / 35. video/film tage 2018, medien.rlp Institut für Medien und Pädagogik Prize