Connected
2015 · 10m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Luke Gilford
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
Jackie, a cycling instructor who motivates people online, is socially isolated, in a midlife crisis and obsessed with her ageing body. When nothing seems able to save her from depression, she enters a futuristic spa that promises physical and spiritual rebirth.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A cycling instructor hawking motivation to strangers while rotting from the inside, then literally buying her own resurrection in a spa pod—it's haute satire dressed as sci-fi despair, and every other scout will call it 'bleak' while missing the joke entirely.
Gilford threads a careful needle between wellness-culture critique and genuine melancholy, positioning the film in conversation with body-horror and futurism while maintaining a formal restraint that lets the contradiction breathe.
The precision here is in the performance restraint—watching Jackie perform unblemished motivation for the camera versus her actual face in the mirror, that sustained tension does all the thematic work without ever announcing it.