Concrete
2024 · 15m · USA
Directed by ELI VIDIS NEWMAN
In an alternate 20th-century America, all citizens wear government-issued neurological implants that they are told prevent their heads from exploding. When Arkady, the lone caretaker of his ailing mother, has his implant forcibly removed by a stranger, his reality begins to unravel and he scrambles for answers.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A premise that actually earns its weirdness—mandatory head-exploding-prevention implants as a control mechanism is the kind of inverted logic that makes consensus reality look like the real dystopia, and Newman commits to the surreal unraveling without winking at the audience.
The film situates itself in a lineage of paranoia cinema and body horror that reaches back through Cronenberg, but its formal restraint—holding steady on the domestic mise-en-scène as the world fractures—gives it a considered gravity that resists easy genre categorization.
Newman's decision to keep the camera almost clinically still while Arkady's certainty collapses around him is the move that transforms what could be a high-concept gimmick into something genuinely unsettling; that formal discipline on a modest scope is what makes the premise land.
Reviews
Concrete may borrow more than it invents, but does so with a confidence that promises great things to come.
Worth a watch for those looking for offbeat sci-fi movies, with a touch of the absurd.
Festivals
- HollyShorts Film Festival 2024