Built to Scale
2023 · 21m · Singapore
Directed by Eliza Goh
Genres: drama, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A timid office worker at a Singapore architecture firm builds a miniature model of her workplace that turns out to have magical properties, letting her bend her colleagues and environment to her will — until she begins absorbing the very toxic culture she was trying to escape.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a sharp reversal—the magical model starts as liberation, then quietly becomes the protagonist's prison, which is exactly the move most films would botch by making it obvious. Goh trusts the audience to feel the trap closing without spelling it out, and that restraint is genuinely subversive.
The film sits deliberately in conversation with both the magical realism tradition (Miéville, del Toro's sensibility) and workplace satire as social critique, using the scale model as a formally rigorous visual metaphor that never collapses into mere allegory.
The decision to have the protagonist physically build and manipulate the model—hands-on, tactile—grounds the surrealism in something real enough that we feel the cost of each small reshaping; it's that embodied labor that makes the absorption of toxic culture land with actual weight.
Festivals
- Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia 2024
- National Youth Film Awards (Singapore) 2024
- Singapore Shorts 2023