Catch
2020 · 16m
Directed by Paul Cooke, Dominic Rees-Roberts
Genres: drama, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
In a post-antibiotic world, a father quarantined with his young daughter must choose between surrendering her to the authorities or risking infection himself.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Post-antibiotic dystopia + father-daughter sacrifice: sounds like every prestige sci-fi short made in the last five years, and Catch doesn't subvert the formula hard enough to justify the premise—it's competent grief-mongering, which is exactly what bores me.
The film's formal restraint—muted color palette, the careful staging of intimacy against institutional threat—positions it squarely in the lineage of intimate apocalyptic cinema, with editing that trusts duration over exposition to build its moral weight.
What elevates this above the concept is the sound design: the way ambient dread creeps in through layered environmental noise, and how the editing punctuates moments of quiet touch between father and daughter, making the central impossible choice land through sensory precision rather than dialogue.